The Left-Right Spectrum and the Big Lie Tactic

30 Oct, 2008 by Van Helsing

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One of the most striking examples of the Big Lie tactic is the Left’s ability to pass off fascism and Nazism as phenomena of the Right.

Mussolini, the father of fascism, came from a socialist background, and was inspired by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who has been called the world’s first modern dictator. The term “fascist” comes from the Italian word for bundle, fascio — the idea being that alone we’re just weak little twigs, but bundled together by an all-powerful state, we become strong through collectivism.

The German version of fascism was even more overtly socialist. Nazi is short for Nationalsozialist, i.e., National Socialist. To quote the extremely progressive Adolf Hitler:

We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.

The only significant right-wing aspect of fascists and Nazis was their appeal to patriotic sentiment. Communists differed only in being less nationalistic, and even more extreme in their opposition to the fundamental human right to own property. Even communists, however, have exploited patriotism. World War II was known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War.

No one would lump conservatives in with communists. So it is remarkable that liberals — who resemble fascists in their reverence for the State, and Nazis in their obsession with race and enthusiasm for abortion — have been able to set up a false spectrum with communists on the left end and Nazis/fascists on the right end, just past conservatives. In actuality, communists are just past Nazis and fascists on the left end; America’s Founding Fathers are on the right end.

On a tip from Artfldgr, here’s some art that drives home the point:

Despite the similarity between communism and fascism/Nazism, progressives want to disassociate themselves from the latter and hang it around conservatives’ necks because WWII conditioned us to perceive fascists as enemies at a visceral level — although communism is, if possible, even more hostile to American principles. The Holocaust has nothing to do with it; progressives shrug off the even vaster genocidal horrors inflicted by Hitler’s ideological cousins Stalin and Mao.

Liberals’ beloved moral equivalence comes into play. Pointing out that Democrat policy, taken to its natural conclusion, leads inevitably toward communism — as Obama has been making so obvious — can be countered with the false argument that conservative principles would similarly lead to an American version of the Third Reich. Once again we are told that what they’re doing is okay because other people are potentially just as bad.

But Americans have already taken conservative principles to the extreme by founding the country in the first place. America as originally established is what conservatives are trying to conserve.

The Left believes in collectivism and subservience to the state. The Right believes in the sanctity and liberty of the individual. That progressives have used their dominance of the media and education to spin fascism as a right-wing phenomenon is a reminder that we need to question everything they’ve told us.

Cross-posted at Moonbattery.