Comments (5)

• Deacon Elurby

• Communism is the goal of socialism, which is but a temporary pause in leftists' forced march of humanity towards hell on earth, about which hell this scribbler has been giving warnings to anyone sympathetic to that cause – to that horrific insanity! – of socialism/communism, which ism's bottom-line underpinnings are expertly retold by Long Visalo, a returnee to Pol Pot's communistic Cambodia in 1973, and who gave this horrifying account of an indoctrination seminar for intellectuals at camp K-15, conducted by Khieu Samphan ["Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare," by Philip Short, pp. 316-317]: "How do we make a communist revolution? The first thing you have to do is to destroy private property. But private property exists on both the material and the mental plane...To destroy material private property, the appropriate method was the evacuation of towns...But spiritual private property is more dangerous, it comprises everything that you think is 'yours', everything that you think exists in relation to yourself—your parents, your family, your wife. Everything of which you say, 'It's mine…' is spiritual private property. Thinking in terms of 'me' and 'my' is forbidden…The knowledge you have in your head, your ideas, are mental private property, too. To become truly revolutionary, you must...wash your mind clean...So the first thing you must do to make yourself fit to participate in the communist revolution…is to wash your mind...If we can destroy all material and mental private property...people will be equal. The moment you allow private property, one person will have a little more, another a little less, and they are no longer equal. But if you have nothing – zero for him and zero for you – that is true equality…If you permit even the smallest part of private property [and private thinking!], you are no longer as one, and it isn't communism"...[p. 325]: "The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought...In the end we will make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that will be needed will be expressed by exactly one word [no hint of what that one word is here], with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten…Every year fewer and fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller...In fact there will be not thought as we understand it now. Orthodoxy [communist orthodoxy] means NOT THINKING [my emphasis]...Orthodoxy is unconsciousness"; an INSANITY, dear reader, that's lost on all leftists harboring any hope of goodness and truth being found in socialism/communism, and so extreme in its Utopian pursuit of equality that even to THINK of how beautiful a sunrise is or to smile at the missteps of a toddler at play or to feel even a hint of pleasure from a warming morning sun invites MENTAL INEQUALITY, which necessarily leads to material inequality, according to the leftist Utopians. How dare you to steal a mental pleasure that some comrade, somewhere, cannot equally share with you? There can be no private thoughts! And today's socialism-/communism-/feminism-driven Left within Western democracies is incrementally leading us there, as today's fairness-driven leftists are tomorrow's equality-driven Pol Pots – those Marxian ARCHITECTS and their liberal-Christian and secular-humanist dupes! – who'll eventually come to TORTURE and/or KILL any opponents of their perfect Marxian equality, and which fact about them ought to horrify any reason-driven person anticipating future results of the Marxists' DIVERSITY MOVEMENT and requisite FORCED INTEGRATION, which their open-borders immigration policies now demand worldwide.

  Magna Carta and Free Speech in GB and U.S.
  http://magnacartaandfreespeech.blogspot.com/

• Published: April 1, 2008 9:55 AM

• JCR

• Murray Rothbard is quoted having writtent:
  'Twenty years ago I was an extreme right-wing Republican, a young and lone "Neanderthal" (as the liberals used to call us) who believed, as one friend pungently put it, that "Senator Taft had sold out to the socialists."'
  I heard Ron Paul having a more positive views on Senator Taft and his foreign policy. I was wondering how much of a Libertarian Senator Taft was?

• Published: April 1, 2008 2:13 PM

• BK Marcus

• JCR says, "I heard Ron Paul having a more positive views on Senator Taft and his foreign policy. I was wondering how much of a Libertarian Senator Taft was?"

  Senator Taft was the leader of the most principled wing of the Republican Party, but he did not stick to the principles the "Taft Republicans" were known for. There are many parts of Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right that praise Taft and especially the Taftites, but to answer your question (or to offer you Rothbard's answer), I've collected the less flattering mentions of Taft from the text.

  First Tom Woods summarizes Taft's role in the Old Right:

  Senator Robert A. Taft, for instance, was the most prominent if perhaps the least consistent of the Republican noninterventionists who greeted Harry Truman's early Cold War policies with skepticism. Taft was critical of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO, each of which he viewed as either unnecessarily provocative or ruinously expensive. Taft, along with lesser-known figures from the House and Senate like George Bender, Howard Buffett, and Kenneth Wherry, constituted the political arm of the Old Right. (p. xiii)

  The rest of the quotations are from Murray Rothbard:

  Senator Taft was the major political figure of that wing of the party, but the confusion—then and since—came from Taft's philosophical devotion to compromise as a good in itself. As a result, Taft was always compromising and "selling out" the individualist cause: the free market at home and nonintervention abroad. In the parlance of that time, then, Taft was really on the "extreme left" of the extreme right wing of the Republicans, and his surrenders of principle were constantly thrown at us by the liberals: "Why, even Senator Taft favors" federal aid to education, or defense of Chiang, or whatever. (pp. 85–6)

  While Senator Taft himself waffled and compromised on foreign affairs, especially in regard to China and the support of Chiang, Representative Bender did not waver. (p. 90)

  The NAM, on the point of a significant laissez-faire victory in labor relations, thus turned completely and called simply for extending the powers of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to regulate unions as well as business—a notion which soon took shape in the Taft-Hartley Act. It was the Taft-Hartley Act that completed the Wagner Act process of taming as well as privileging industrial unionism, and bringing the new union movement into the cozy junior partnership with Big Business and Big Government that we know so well today. Once again, Taft, in opposition to the purists and "extreme" Rightists in Congress, played a compromising role. (p. 118)

  I was not a Taft enthusiast on any absolute scale, because of his repeated compromises and "sellouts" in domestic and foreign affairs, and in the climactic meeting of the club that voted for the presidential endorsement, in which Taft won a sizable minority, Ronnie and I cast our two votes for Senator Everett Dirksen (R., Ill.). (p.122)

  But in the momentous convention itself, I was of course for Taft and still more in opposition to the leftist—corporate liberal—Wall Street takeover, which conquered on the crest of an outrageous press campaign implying that Taft had "stolen" the Southern delegations. When Taft was cheated out of the nomination, I for one walked out of the Republican Party, never to return. In the election I supported Stevenson, largely as the only way to get the Wall Street incubus off the back of the Republican Party. (p. 123)

  … an excellent article by Garet Garrett in the Wall Street Journal. Garrett had attacked the bipartisan imperialist foreign policy and denounced all the presidential candidates, including Taft, for supporting it. (p. 132n)

• Published: April 1, 2008 7:27 PM

• Thedo

• I think I should begin reading Conceived in Liberty because Rothbard's quotes about ill-written history in this writing and the previous one on 'How Not to Write American History' have intrigued me, and I find them particularly poignant.

  We recently discussed capitalism in one of my rhetoric classes and we read a series of articles for and against. Rothbard's comment on how communism was not even defined in the book is particularly striking. In my class's book neither is "laissez-faire" capitalism!

  I made a point of contesting an argument one day in class by one of the arguments "for" capitalism and how the author's proposal didn't seem laissez-faire, according to the definition of laissez-faire. I asked my teacher if my definition were correct and she couldn't even respond yes or no!

  Imagine: An entire class debating for or against a topic that they didn't know what they were debating!

• Published: April 2, 2008 8:36 AM

• Alex Peak

• I love how the option to listen to the article was made available, and embedded into the page!

• Published: April 3, 2008 12:09 AM