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Soooo... US “libertarianism” is about as fascist as Heinrich Himmler.
Apparently Rothbard wasn't as bad as Himmler, but he was bad enough.
You no more have to be a disciple of Rothbard, Rand, or Hoppe to be a libertarian, anymore than you have to be a tankie to be leftist, however tankies might say otherwise.
Of course not - the likes of Rothbard or Rand will never be caught dead close to the mass-graves their ideological grifting helped to dig.
I make a hard distinction between leftists and political racketeers masquerading as leftists right until they get the power they crave. I place everything spawned by the Bolsheviks in the latter category.
There is nothing unique or new about this distinction.
Rand wrote about the Nazis and fascists.
She didn't like them.
So are you saying that your brand of leftism was spawned before the Bolsheviks—i.e. over 100 years ago?
What do you think about Karl Marx, a 19th century political philosopher, IIUC?
She sure liked their methods.
The French didn't invent left or right - they just invented a useful shorthand to distinguish between the two.
The most successful socialists on the planet used fascistic methods.
Such as?
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, probably Tito and Castro, arguably Pol Pot, Guzman, arguably the PFLP.
Perpetrating mass-murder against the working class doesn't conform to any worthwile description of the term "socialism" - so that disqualifies everyone on your list except Tito and Castro. And I'd describe them purely as nationalists.
They might say things like "triage," "greater good," and "ends justify the means";
or as the Vietnam vet joke goes: "You don't know, man! You weren't there!"
Kerensky failed.
Lenin died.
Trotsky lived in a client state of the Capitalist US Empire.
Stalin got things done, and Brezhnev, for whatever his faults, continued it.
https://youtu.be/QuN6GfUix7c?t=409 (cued, for about a minute)
(and the thing supposedly in Camaroon apparantly didn't happen)
It's almost like they will say anything to justify the status quo - perfectly in line with all those seeking to enforce it.
Only if you believe "got things done" includes almost handing the Soviet Union over to the nazis through his criminal mismanagement of the Red Army and/or forcing a murderously hamfisted, top-down industrialization program on the working class that the actual soviet councils would have achieved in a far, far more efficient manner without massive amounts of bloodshed and famine if the Bolsheviks hadn't hijacked them and turned them into glorified rubberstamping bureucracies in their bloody counter-revolution back in the early 20s.
You should be careful of "Great Man" fallacies. They are usually perfectly ahistorical. Whatever the Soviet Union achieved, it didn't achieve them because of Joseph Stalin - it achieved them in spite of him.
Well said. 😁🙂