An Open Letter to This Year’s College Freshman Class On the Subject of Fascism
August 28, 2017
Dear Class of 2021:
As you begin your college career you will inevitably become confused about the subject of “fascism,” which has been in the news quite a bit recently. On the one hand, you will be taught that there is nothing more evil, more insidious, more despicable than fascism and fascists. You might even be invited to become a member of “antifa,” the violent criminal gang that sets buildings and cars on fire, clubs people with baseball bats, sprays mace in their faces, throws cinder blocks through store windows, hurls bottles filled with urine and feces at the police, etc., in supposed protests against “fascism.” (“Antifa” is said to stand for “anti-fascism”).
But on the other hand you will also be taught that the very things that real, twentieth-century fascists believed in and stood for are what you should believe in and stand for, and that you should have zero tolerance for anyone who disagrees with you. These things will not be called what they are – fascism – but pleasant-sounding euphemisms like “social justice,” “economic democracy,” “liberation theology,” or “democratic socialism.” You will also be instructed that of all the politicians on the planet, the one whom you should revere and idolize is the seventy-five –year-old self-described socialist Bernie Sanders (who spent part of his honeymoon in Moscow, of all places, during the height of the Cold War).
The truth is that fascism – named “national socialism” by the German socialists of the early twentieth century known as the “Nazis” – was always a form of socialism. Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian fascism, was an “international socialist” before he started calling himself a national socialist. Nationalist socialism was content to allow private business to exist – unlike the international socialists in the Soviet Union – as long as it was directed, controlled, and micromanaged by politicians with all kinds of regulations, controls, subsidies, bailouts, and taxes.
From Lewrockwell.com, here.