OF THE
TIMES
"We created a virtual open shop for thievery at a national level and for capital flight in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars, and the reaping of natural resources and industries on a scale which I doubt has ever taken place in human history." ~ E. Wayne Merry, chief political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow (1990-1994)The foregoing article is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my book Grand Deception: the Truth about Bill Browder, Magnitsky Act and Anti-Russian Sanctions. Part 1 is here.
...the French Revolution was the first totalitarian revolution, the mother of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual model for the Italian Fascist, German Nazi, and Russian Communist revolutions. A nationalist-populist uprising, it was led and manipulated by an intellectual vanguard determined to replace Christianity with a political religion that glorified "the people," anointed the revolutionary vanguard as their priests, and abridged the rights of individuals.Revolution isn't exactly a conservative talking point, now is it? Or consider an early program of Mussolini, "the father of fascism": some of the things these early fascists wanted included a lowering of the minimum voting age, the end of the draft, the repeal of titles of nobility, a minimum wage, building "rigidly secular" schools for the proletariat, a large progressive tax system... in other words, a classically leftist platform. Fascism was, in a sense, a Bolshevik revolution minus internationalism. Consequently, many American progressives at the time were full of praise for Mussolini. Hitler was similarly anti-capitalist and anti-conservative. Writes Goldberg:
The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic- including environmentalism, health food, and exercise- and, most of all, the need to "transcend" notions of class.Goldberg leaves no doubt that fascism - both Mussolini's classical fascism and Hitler's Nazism - but also communism as fascism's equally-evil-twin - is in essence collectivist, anti-capitalist, anti-religion (except that it can use religion sometimes to further its aims), wants to control everything in the name of welfare, progress and for the "good of the people", uses science as a sort of priestly class to provide justification for the leaders of "the movement", hates the individual and always seeks to advance the collective... yep, exactly the Orwellian nightmare we see today, mostly on the left.
Comment: Ironically, Michael Moore, who signed the Common Ground document, is among those who are offended by the summit:
Don't miss the whole Putin and Trump press conference:
Post-summit Trump-Putin press conference (full text): First step toward renewing US-Russian friendship?