Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

To: colorado tanker
I've had this quote on my FR profile page for more than a decade, maybe as much as 15 years, but it is hugely appropriate right now. They hated each other, and were allies in the dismemberment of Poland. Woody Guthrie's guitar didn't fight Fascists until after 1941. Before then, like many Communist Leftists in the US, he was for neutrality since the Nazis were allied with his buds the Soviet Communists.

Herewith the quote:

Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "communism" and "fascism." As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."

No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.

-- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944
Of course, he's talking Classical liberals, not the re-branded collectivist Leftism the term denotes today in the US due to their hijacking of the term, running from the Socialist moniker.
10 posted on 08/19/2017 5:17:48 PM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies ]


To: FreedomPoster

Great quote!


15 posted on 08/19/2017 5:50:23 PM PDT by colorado tanker
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies ]

To: FreedomPoster
Woody Guthrie's guitar didn't fight Fascists until after 1941

Woody Guthrie's guitar never killed any fascists.


20 posted on 08/19/2017 5:56:40 PM PDT by Fiji Hill
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson