Pop Quiz: The End of Civilization?

mind control beams: Looks to be about the size of it.

Meller, once again. You aren’t just ignorant of the history of the American Left, you’re ignorant of the Right. And the middle, I’m sure.

First of all, Even if the people caught in the red scare were bona fide Soviets all, I have sympathy for people who were persecuted by the State regardless of their beliefs. Thing called principles.

Yes, some on the right were opponents of war and imperialism. This is not news. Red Scare jingoism was very much about turning that around. McCarthy was no non-interventionist.
See my above comment. Really, read that book. Read *a* book.

Pre-Cold War, the DIVIDE between commie/pinko/red/socialist/communist and free-market/right/individualist/libertarian/conservative
wasn’t as stark and cartoonish. In some cases, it was *barely even there.* Particularly in the labor organization and pacifist movements.

You had tory anarchist Menken, with his peaons to laissez faire and
space in his paper for any socialist with a pacifist bone in their body. You had “voluntary socialists” like Tucker. You had people finding common cause with those they
disagreed with, which became the cardinal American sin in WWII and beyond. Our cartoons of left and right are a legacy of that era.

Heck, I’m a lady who shifts between naming herself an Anarcho-Capitalist and a Libertarian Socialist, merely because when you get down to brass tacks
there isn’t really much to distinguish one position from the other. I’m not a fan of Roosevelt and the New Deal, (In no small part because it was a grand act of Affirmative Action for White Folks…) I despise Wilson, but I’m way, way less of a fan of the new Conservativism that tried to make a less kind and gentle version. If I’m gonna live in a state, then yes, a safety net is preferable to mercantilist jingoism that beats me with a stick and calls it tough love. I’d rather have laissez faire, but when it comes to organizing a just and free society, I say socialism can damn well compete with capitalism, and may the best anarchism win.

(Actually, Darksidecat, this is a good time to publically apologize for any misunderstanding I’ve caused – When I play with NWO and throw socialist/commie/collectivist around as an invective, it’s trying to play by his cartoon rules and show him that some of his silly
ranting sounds just like what he tars in anybody else he’s arguing with. )

zhinxy: I am fond of FDR: He was, perhaps, a bit blinkered, but the important things he did (the WPA, SS, etc.) were/are pretty neutral.

More to the point, he put the initial pieces in place for a more evenhanded society, and (much as I might like to wake up tomorrow and see things as I’d like them to be) there is no way to do it all at once.

When all is said and done, he did more good than ill, and that’s more than most in his job can say.

zhinxy

I AGREE with you about the American Right (what Murray Rothbard called the “old right”, I agree with yoy about the Cold War, I agree with you about Mencken, Tucker (NOT a socialist, by the way), and other prominent figures of that movement–who earnestly HATED Wilson, the Federal Reserve,the Federal Incom Tax and entry into wWI) and hated even more FDR, his “new deal” and his endless and reckless provocations (at the behest of the British and to a lesser extent Jewish-American organizations) to get us into war on their side.

I HAVE read, and enjoyed, Rothbard’s writings, including and not limited to, Betrayal of the American Right. Also his essay Wall St and American Foreign Polcy, and many other pieces of Rothbardiana. In B, he however, documents how it is the communists, working closely with FDR during WWII, when he and they (the Stalin government were allies, viciously persecuted the Old right, driving them from public life, and sometimes even exposing them to legal sanctions for alleged ‘sedition’ under the Smith Act!

The chapter after WWII is where Rothbard discusses how many of the “old right’ who didn’t die off (Nock in 1945, Mencken in 1948–although he lived until 1955, M was incapactitated by a stroke that year, and retired permanantly–Taft in 1953, et al) all responded warmly to the New Right, created by the sinister CIA agent William F Buckley of Yale, to join them– against their erstwhile enemies– through an anti-communist witchhunt. Entirely understandably, long overdue, in my opinion, and reasonably justified in Rothbard’s account. It is only MUCH later, that Rothbard comes to a history of the Cold war and decides that the US government was using anticommmunism as an excuse for empire overseas and fascism at home, and comes to oppose American foreigh policy as a whole!

Rothbard even discusses tthe role that Communists played in and through the FDR government in the dispossession and persecution of genuine peace loving leftists during those very bitter years!

zhinxy, you were so eager to attack me in your above post that you overlooked our many points of agreement! There WERE leftists from the 1940s, e.g. Oswald Garrison Villard, Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles Austen Beard, Dwight Macdonald, John DosPassos, et al. down through the 1960’s, e.g. Gabriel Kolko, Carl Oglesby, Paul Goodman, William Appleman Williams… who indeed made common cause with the libertarian “old right” of Murray Rothbard, but they were NEVER Stalinists, and were indeed exiled by, and hated by their former comrades just as much as libertarians/ ‘anarchists’ like Rothbard.

Beleive me, I have been a libertarian (and “anarchist”, at least politically) for around four decades–culturally, as you probably have guessed by my posts on these pages, I am a paleoconservative, and I speak from serious understanding about it. We have so many adversaries, we don’t need to be attacking each other. Believe me, I KNOW that the left did not speak with one voice, and that real Americans had friends on the Left, but the element of the American left targeted by McCarthy (Communist Party members and contributors) were no friends of ours, either during the ’30s or later, and I support the assertion (along with Rothbard) that they deserved what they got, McCarthy’s (and US government’s) misbegotten foreign and defence policy notwithstanding!

darksidecat–I support Hitler the way you support Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Ivan the Terrible (just thought that I throw that in for the heck of it!)

‘Nuff said!

As far as Hitler supporting capitalism–look at Mises’ Omnipotent Government, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and even William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich–where S quotes a ex-German businessman Fritz Thyssen discussing how foolish and shortsighted his earlier support of Hitler and the Nazis was. Hitler was never a supporter of capitalism in any way, shape, or form, even for demagogic purposes. Even in Mein Kampf, he called for the explicit dispossession of the German business classes, and their replacement by party faithful…

Hitler supported, and gained most of his power inheriting (in effect) the Social Democratic regime of the Weimar Republic. All the Nazis did, upon assuming power, was staff the already pervasive and widespread controls and bureaucracies with their own, get rid of their Social Democrat rivals–who were no longer needed anyway–and call the New Order “National Socialist” rather than “Social Democrat. The Social Democrats were NO supporters of Capitalism–they were, for the most part, fervent Marxists, who like British Fabians, preferred to use the State apparatus to build socialism from within, rather than armed revolution like the Bolsheviks. This also allowed them to run for office in their respective countries legally, to implement their Marxism under the guise of popular support and legality, and to build up the power and extent of the German (and British) State to the point when an EXPLICITLY totalitarian party took hold (the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party), there could be no effective opposition or resistance!

Taking a leaf from your book, darksidecat, why do YOU show your pathetic ignorance of history, economics, and World War II by calling Hitler, of all people, a “supporter of capitalism”, and calling me a “nazi”?

Arrgh! I’m pressed for time and this is far, FAR shorter than the epic novel that would come close to expressing my reactions! –
Raoul –
You know, don’t you, that the Democratic Party of those years was by no means a cross section of American polity. It had only two power blocs: the urban Catholic Northeast and the agrarian racist South, who made a coalition only as long as the South was allowed to remain racist.

If FDR had made any real move to better the conditions of Blacks in the ’30s, it would have destroyed the party and taken him down with them, and given the volatile tenor of the times, probably opened the door to widespread demagoguery and violence.

Oh. Well, that makes it all okay then? Seriously, I don’t know how to respond to that except to say that yes, I know the context, and in general “WHY the racism.” And even if I thought there would have been utter rack and ruin otherwise, I would remain not a fan? I don’t have to engage in apologetics for structural racism, even if I understand it in context. And I think your post skates far too close to “the times were different!” “It was the best they could do!” “They just weren’t ready for civil rights then!” apologetics for my comfort.

Pecunium – I don’t have time to get into FDR and all my many thoughts and feelings! Curse it!

And Meller – Oh god is this ever the short version…

“We have so many adversaries, we don’t need to be attacking each other.”

I’ve been a paleocon libertarian of sorts. I know and have worked with plenty of paleocons,
even ones who are much fonder of traditional gender roles than I, who aren’t bigoted reactionary loons. There’s not such a shortage that I have to like you.

We (possibly) agree on some basic libertarian principles. Hey, that’s great. Seriously.
But even if we were in almost complete agreement on many, many things?

You want me to be a soft, pettable ornament, who in my old age will become a dispenser of pithy quotes. At best.

That’s good enough to make me your adversary. Believe it or not, a freedom minded individualist like myself doesn’t want to overthrow the State only to find myself put in my place by malignant social order.

And ah! Rothbard!

Rothbard, Rothbard, Rothbard. Such a huge influence on me, no matter how many disagreements I have with him.

Since you’ve given me his mini-bio, I’m sure you know about the strange bedfellow alliances he made with anti-war Marxists at Brooklyn Polytechnic, about the heyday of the journal Left and Right, about his harsh realization that he and other libertarians
had come to the disastrous conclusion:

“first, that conservatives, no matter how divergent, were our “natural” allies, and second,
hat there was little real difference between liberals and Communists. Why not then fuzz
the truth a bit and use the anti-Communist bludgeon to hit at the liberals, especially since
the liberals had become entrenched in power and were running the country? There was a temptation that few of us could resist”

Read that again, and take it to heart. For it is one of the Great Lessons of Murray…

That it was and is utterly fucking unproductive, dishonest,
stupid for libertarians to cling to the right, and
throw cries of Stalinism at the left in a way that
blocks out reality and any hope of common cause.

The lesson you seem to have missed.

It just isn’t true that there was, once, in the distant past, a “good left” but it has long sense been destroyed and infiltrated and replaced by a hundred percent evil, government loving Stalinist left that must be staked through the heart and buried with garlic. Feminism especially is not some plan cooked up in the Kremlin. The story of how the feminists of libertarianism – And there were not a few were abandoned by the shift to ally with cultural conservatives is another book!)

Now i REALLY must go, so I will just have to leave you with screamy declaritive sentences and many explanation points. I trust you will understand!!:

Yes, much that was good about the left died in the war years. But that happened just as much to the right!
I have no need nor desire to fight you on things we agree on!!
The many, many things on which we do not agree on are good enough!
I am not a piece of jewelery!
I don’t put anarchy in quotation marks.
I hate Mises! He was a douche!!
The Left is not a Stalinist conspiracy.
Feminism especially is not some Soviet plot!
Common cause can be made with socialists, including actual COMMUNISTS and especially as anarchists, SHOULD BE!!
There actually are things to be said about figures on the Left speaking too kindly of the Soviets!
As there are things to be said about Hayek and such speaking far too kindly of Pinochet and his ilk!
But there are few things of any value being said about any of that. Just AHAH, I KNEW IT ALL ALONG! BEHOLD YOUR TRUE FACE! THE FACE OF A LOVER OF DICTATORS AND HATER OF FREEDOM! I GOTCHA! MWAHAHAHHAAH!

And yes, see blacbloc, Tucker did consider his brand of libertarianism “Voluntary socialism”

Freedom, love, destruction of the kyriarchy, sex workers, drugs, queer liberation, and guns!

-Zhinxy

Zhinxy–

Whew!! I don’t really know what you are saying, sounding as you do that you love Murray on one hand and hate him on the other. My impressions of him are universally favorable. If he wasn’t ‘Mr. Libertarian’ during his adult life, he would easily do until someone else came along.

I will simply try to remark on your statements, one my one, in order of your numbers, and see where it gets us, Okay?

1) Don’t I know it! Compare the “right wing” of Col. McCormack of the Chicago Tribune with the National Review of W.F. Buckley. Compare Henry Hazlitt or Ludwig von Mises with e.g. Milton Friedman or Arthur Burns. Compare Robert Taft with Ronald Reagan. Compare John T. Flynn or H.L. Mencken with Irving Kristol or Norman Podhoretz. Compare Rose Wilder Lane with Phyllis Schafly, or nowadays, Ann Coulter. I could go on, but Murray was right when he said that the Old Right was replaced with a right wing that was almost its exact opposite!

2) Then why the paranoid hysterics on your part? You and I agree that peace is better than war, civil liberties are preferable to government intimidation and repression, and even (I hope,) that prosperity–even private property based prosperity–is better than communal want and hardship!

3) Many, many things?

4) You are not a piece of jewelry? Did I say anywhere that you were? Did Rothbard? Where did that come from? Wherever, in manboobz.com, I talk about soft, compliant, adorable, and playful women, I am contrasting my Ideal women with feminists and modern women. This is MY preference, but as we don’t know each other, it shouldn’t be of any interest to you anyway!

5) Maybe you should have! Anarchy is so vague, unclear, and prone to misunderstanding that it has long since lost all meaning! Look at your above post–you call yourself an anarchist, and seem to have kind words for statists of all sorts–the non-Stalinist left of the ’30s and ’40s. For heaven’s sakes, does this include Trotsky and his followers? You don’t endorse Trotskyism and his support of World Marxist Revolution in your posts, but you never criticised him either!

You hate Mises…” Frankly, if you hate Mises, you probably have to hate Rothbard–and his ideals of personal liberty–as well!

Mises was THE primary intellectual, philosophical, and perhaps even moral guide to Rothbard throughout his immensely productive career. It was Mises who set R upon the sound praxeological a prioristic foundation (Austrian Economics, or praxeology) of writing for the social sciences, it was Mises who informed R about how economic science, properly understood, and grounded in individual human action, led to an unbreakable and airtight defence of a free and prosperous society, it was Mises–no “anarchist” himself–who inspired R to write the first logically rigorous, completely consistant, praxeological defence of a truly stateless society–Man Economy and State, and Power and Market! Rothbard, even where he strongly disagreed with Mises, throughout his life, wrote paens of love and respect for von Mises, leaving no doubt that Ludwig von Mises was his guide, his mentor, and in many important ways, his philosophical and libertarian “father’!

6)Rothbard, and Mises, would agree with you there. There was, and could never be, a “unified communist cospiracy” when communism started to come to power in many different parts of the world independently of Moscow.The hallucination of a unified Communist threat to the “free world” was altogether a creation of the Buckleyite ‘new right’ which, as we have seen, was TOTALLY AT VARIANCE with the much more libertarian “old right, celebrated by Rothbard, and to some extent, von Mises!

7) Feminism is no “soviet plot” but I think that a very strong case can be made that Feminism and Communism come from the same ideological roots. There are feminists who sometimes sound like all they have done is substitute “war of the sexes” for conflict of classes. A Soviet plot? I don’t think so. A strong and enduring similarity between communists and feminists? Very considerable!

Common cause? No Fooling!! There has been a pointless, endless, and horribly destructive series of wars since 9/11, fought by the same ogre, the sewer-city on the Potomac, where as long as Bush II (the Stupid) was infesting the oval office, alliances existed and grew around the world! Come Obomber, and his African background, and half-assed health plans, and almost all of you leftists completely disappeared! Youall entered a state of political suspended animation, as far as I could see! Objections on your part to the appalling civil liberties violations of the current Criminal in Chief? None that I can see…

The ONLY antiwar movements that I can see today are Rothbardian type libertarian ones! Yes, Zhinxi, we have common cause, but why are you telling ME? Why haven’t you been telling your comrades on the left for the past three years or so?

No, sweetie, there AREN’T!! The Soviets were a barbarous, blood drenched and loathsome tyranny, arguably, with the rival to the East, Mao Zedong, the VERY WORST government(s) in human history! The facts were known almost immediately after the Reds gained power in their respective countries. Kind words for the Soviets–or Maoists, for that matter–are kind words for barbarity and exploitation that no capitalists could ever rival, and for evil that probably has no precedence in an all too blood drenched human history!

Hayek (and his ilk)? See above. I daresay that for every murder that Pinochet committed, Stalin and Mao each committed at least 100! I also am bold enough to think that at least Pinochet was defending Chile against a real threat, avoiding turning into Cuba II, whereas, Stalin and Mao committed their murders and tortures in peacetime, where there were no threats, either by subversion or attack, at all!

As long as we are on the subject, Pinochet targeted ex-Allende supporters, whereas the terror of the Stalin Purges (or Mao’s so-called “cultural revolution”) targeted ordinary people who had no interest in government affairs; merely wanted to survive the horror that they found themselves in as best they could, and couldn’t POSSIBLY ever have been a threats to the party or government! Pinochet was a bum, but even he–and his regime–was almost angelic compared with the considerable number of apologists for the Stalin (and later Mao) barbarity!

No, Zhinxi, not ALL leftists were like that, but too many were. FAR too many! Feel better about Hayek now?

Supporter of dictators? See above and look in the nearest mirror. Even if you personally weren’t, far too many were, and with much less reason than Hayek, Friedman, et al!

Meller, who did you respond to? o_O

You headed the post to Zhinxy but nothing you said is a response to her xD Are you sure you understood nething she said? o:

Like… easy question here:

what do you believe Zhinxy believes?

zhinxy: He doesn’t think you can think. A woman capable of doing more than the laundry is a mutant freak. That you are literate has ruined your mind by confusing you with things you can’t understand.

You suffer from being in conflict with your fluffy-nature, which makes you bitter; since you don’t have a man to love and cherish and worship and be submissive to. Instead you are trying to do something (think about manly things) and that leads to disappointment.

Which is why you are a feminist… because you aren’t able to do what you are trying to do. Rather than admit it’s because you aren’t with a man, you are projecting your internal frustrations at men, and making it impossible for yourself, and other women, to realise your proper role.

(also she’s my best friend 😀 So if you want her, you have to take me too XD We come as a group :3 Actually we come w/ Trish too but Trish isn’t on this blog xD )

Late to mention this, but I’m now totally imagining you all as velociraptors circling a hopelessly-confused DKM… He’ll think he’s winning and then swing around to see more behind him. Dun DUN! “Clever girl!” 😀

holy shit. its david k meller in last of the red hot birchers

“Evaporation” in a legal, not a chemical sense, you silly woman! It should be a matter of concern to everyone that the safeguards and “due process” mentioned in the Constitution don’t mean anything anymore but what the bureaucrats in the Amerikan Kommisariat of Law Enforcement (a.k.a. “Justice Department) say that it means!

All the same to you, no doubt, until feminists start being carted off to FEMA centers for “rehabilitation”.

Revolutions often devour their own!