Preface, Introduction, Sections and Chapters

Section and chapter titles beyond the introduction, along with brief comments on each, will be added/changed as the book develops.


Would You Like Borders With That Socialism?
by John Tagliaferro

PREFACE

When my wife read a draft of the introduction and section one, she said, “You should title the book Information for Argument’s Sake.”  In many ways, that title is more appropriate than many I almost selected.  Indeed there is a lot of information here that one does not normally run across whilst having a spirited discussion at the pub and the vast majority of it would never be heard in a teacher’s lounge, nor in a classroom.
Some of what follows can be heard on talk radio, C-SPAN, and on the Public Broadcasting System, PBS, the largest network in America, which brings me to part of the reason why I wrote this book.  So much of what I have been hearing from people who worship PBS do not seem to watch it.  They demand it be funded, they might say they donate, they might say they watch, but when I bring up details from some of the greatest shows ever aired on PBS these Leftists swear that the quotes were mangled or fabricated by me.
If there was any starting point for this book, at least the idea to write it all down, it came from discussions after seeing The Slave Kingdoms on PBS (http://www.pbs.org/wonders/fr_e3.htm viewed 15 JUN 2012).  I had long known that the notion of Europeans running about the coast of Western Africa with nets catching Black people was preposterous and this show is a great source for much of the truth.
However, PBS was not my only source of inspiration.  After my decades journey from the American Left to the extreme Right I learned many things that shattered my Leftist beliefs and brought me to the truth, especially the truth about what the Right really is.

INTRODUCTION

Political discussion in English can be difficult, but it really does not have to be that way.  Many of the terms that we use should have agreed meanings, but in reality, they are squishy at best and outright deceptive at worst.  For example, in England a Liberal holds completely different values than a Liberal in the United States of America.  These differences in terms also cross time.  In the 1800s and 1900s, what was called Liberal is now called Classical Liberal in the USA due to the “hijacking” of the term by Leftists.  However, you will never hear a Leftist admit that.  Today they tend to label everything they like at the moment as Liberal and everything else as Right Wing or fascist.

The same goes for Left versus Right.  One of the problems with the Left vs. Right concept is that since its creation in revolutionary France it has had two completely different meanings. Back in the late 18th century, it was quite literal. The legislators who were most closely aligned with the French Monarchy sat on the right side of the aisle that ran through the legislative chamber. Those who wanted to distance themselves from the Crown and who advocated individual liberty sat to the left.  Pretty simple right?  You may have heard similar descriptions before, especially in a high school or college classroom.

Does this mesh at all with the people who call themselves Left or Right in the USA today?  Not a bit, but the media and education industries keep using that 18th century terminology as if it were still true today.  What is never stated is that the “definition” changed in 1928.  It did not change because of some gradual evolution in the way people described themselves, it changed abruptly because one political leader declared himself and his philosophy to be the far Left and everything else in all of politics was to his right.  That leader was Joseph Stalin, the man who perfected the non-hereditary dictatorship system.

One of the problems with the people who discuss politics in the USA is a complete lack of knowledge of this history.  Another problem is the set of people who know full well about this history, yet they choose to confuse the issue.  Yet a different problem is the range, or the spectrum, that they use when talking politics.  There is that “Political Circle” thing that professors of everything other than history or political science use to sell Socialism when they are supposed to be teaching math, or English, or drum circling.  They go through a long explanation, whilst dodging or ignoring logical hoops, to tell their captive audience that, “Yes, Stalin and Hitler were both totalitarians, but they were really opposites, and, oh, by-the-way, my belief is not totalitarian, just kindness and sharing that every reasonable person can agree on.”  Of course, his idea of who should be in charge of all this reasonable, voluntary caring, and sharing is someone learned in the subject, like him and his fellow chalk dust manufacturers.

More recently, David F. Nolan, the founder of the American Libertarian Party tried to create a new description called the Nolan Chart.  Much more descriptive, using Economic Freedom on the X-Axis and Personal Freedom on the Y-Axis, it places libertarians off on their own away from the Left and the Right.  If you never heard of it, I encourage you to look it up.  However, with the obscurity of the Nolan Chart makes discussion a little difficult.  This can change if customers of the education industry bring the Nolan Chart up every time some teacher starts making circles in the air to ‘prove’ that Communist Totalitarianism is somehow different than National Socialist Totalitarianism.  Also, the Nolan Chart sets Economic and Personal Freedoms on different axis, when they are truly inseparable.  Segmenting freedom is usually a bad idea that allows anti-freedom forces to impose their will on others.

I am not going to invent a completely new protocol for describing the range of political philosophies, others keep trying and those systems never catch on.  Since I see Economic Freedom and Personal Freedom as inseparable, they can stay on the same axis, the Axis of Freedom.  It begins on the Right and continues to the Left in a straight line.  When given the choice between the French Left and Stalin’s Left, and for the sake of simplicity, I will stick with Stalin’s Left, i.e., Socialism/Communism as the far Left.  Trust me it is simpler this way, but it creates a different problem.  Stalin called National Socialists (Fascists, Nazis, Falangi) and others “Right Wing,” the “polar opposite” of Communists, when in fact they were only ever so slightly “right” of the Communists, as I will show in this book.  I define the Right Wing as the freedom loving Conservatives and libertarians.

The social Left and Right is a completely different animal.  Social Conservatives and Social Liberals may or may not bring their likes and dislikes onto the political battlefield.  Everybody has likes and dislikes in areas of fashion, religion and personal proclivities, but not all impose their likes and dislikes on others.  Every person who yearns for speech codes, dress codes, religious law, or what have you, enforced by the government is on the political Left and those who want to keep government out of those, and most other things, is on the political Right.  For example, as I write this book the mayor of New York City is demonstrating that National Socialism (fascism) exists in the Republican Party and it was brought there by a lifelong Leftist.

Perhaps you already see, or you may have experienced firsthand, where this sort of Left/Right; Conservative/libertarian terminology leads in a discussion.  You bring up Conservative and you are called a Nazi, but due to the way these things are taught and discussed in the USA, you might not know to respond, “No, Sir or Madame, I do not have a Socialist bone in my body.”  Remember, if we are defining the opposite of Totalitarian Communists we cannot possibly be talking about people who:  Tell you who you can date; what race or faith you can be to hold office; how or where you may worship or if that is even allowed; how many children you may have; which groups may live or die; centrally plan the national economy; and a whole host of other distasteful things that Communists do or want to do.  Fascists and Nazis (even the new or neo variety) are Socialists of a different type than Communists and political rivals to Communists.  Stalin called Social Democrats “Right Wing” and “fascist” too, but somehow they are no longer lumped in with Nazis.

A note on the Conservative/libertarian capitalization:  I capitalize Conservative because it is an identifiable political grouping, but there is no Conservative Party in the United States of America.  Libertarian is both a political philosophy, as well as a political party in the USA, and when used for the Libertarian Party it will be capitalized.

Don’t worry, every bit of what I say above will be proved in detail in this book.  I am, by far, not the first person to point these things out.  Nobel Memorial Prize winner Friedrich Hayek said a lot of it in his 1930s masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom, while Socialism was on the rise.  Jonah Goldberg said a lot of it in Liberal Fascism in 2008 (I own the web domain http://Liberal-Fascism.Com, but I had nothing to do with his book other than reading and enjoying it).  Daniel Pipes at Harvard has said a lot of it.  The Black Book of Communism is filled with it.  Conservative talk radio and television hosts mention much of it too.  Those sources are not perfect and where I have found errors, I present you with the correct information.
Even though much of the information in this book is easy enough to find on the internet, much of it has “evaporated” and is referenced through old-school print material when not available through internet archives.   Man cannot research by Google alone.  While the internet is a great tool, it is only a tool.  Sometimes internet sources are authoritative, like Marxists.Org.  Other times they are mostly conjecture, like Snopes.Com, and other times they fall somewhere in the middle, like Wikipedia.Org.  You can find leads to plenty of original source material in each, but their conclusions should not be taken as gospel.

A recent convention in the way people read is on or with a nearby internet enabled device, so the web address of sources are given with items referenced, along with the date when they were found, in all versions of this book.  Also, since the Stewart Smalley, AKA the Senator Al Franken’s of the world are so baffled by footnotes and endnotes, full context of historical documents and speeches are given in the body when possible, e.g, Communist and Fascist Manifestos, so the reader may read them in place or flip/scroll past them. (http://lyingliar.com/?p=39 09 JUN 2012).

One thing you will notice, if you have not noticed already, is that the farther Left a person is the more they will deny facts that challenge their beliefs.  The educational and news industries teach this in the opposite way than you or I experience in real life.  In my personal experience, people who claimed to be my friends from high school and college have gone into online rages for much less than that and here are two mild examples:  One college friend unfriended me on Facebook after a rant toward me just because I would not bash Sarah Palin in a discussion.  It was not even a topic that I was disagreeing with my friend on, other than his pathological hatred for the woman and his female specific profanity laced manner.  Months later, a high school friend, who is Jewish and Socialist, accused me of calling him a Nazi, in a discussion where he was the only person who used the term.  From what I could tell, he was upset that anybody dare mention that Nazis were (and still are) Socialists and he was going to shut me up by threatening our friendship.  He did not sound like much of a friend to me, so I never responded to him again.  Note also, I did not unfriend either of them from Facebook, that is what they did and I did not stand in their way.

This is not to say that people on the real Right cannot be annoying, difficult, rude, tedious, jerks.  Ayn Rand was unquestionably a member of the political Right and the consensus is that she was a royal bitch in person.  This seems to be the most obvious trait that many of her fans retain, decades after her death.  In the current era, Dr. Ron Paul, Republican House of Representatives member from Texas, seems to be a personable and genuinely nice person.  However, his fans (see the online forums of his followers) can be the rudest, crudest people on the internet.  Dr. Paul seems to attract more than his share of outlandish conspiracy believers too.
A word about Conservatives and libertarians, i.e., the Right.  They are not the same, but they are not mutually exclusive either.  I am a libertarian and a Conservative, sharing things I like from both and tend to approach things from the libertarian perspective.  Conservatives tend to approach things from a statist direction, but they do not want the state doing that much.  Libertarians approach things from the other direction, they see government as a last resort and whenever a political discussion erupts we ask, “Why should the government even be involved?”

The easiest path to the book blog is http://Liberal-Fascism.Com, which contains more on-topic information along with all comments, pro or con, minus SPAM.

There is a lot more to this, as you will see in the book that follows.

(More to  come as sections are completed)

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