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They loathe Liberalism and Capitalism, globalization and free trade with an irrational dogmatic ardor on the verge of monoideism even though they could barely defines them precisely but through caricature, platitude, approximation and falsehood forged by their own propaganda.They unite naturally around the designation of a common target, personifying these concepts -- otherwise very abstract for them. They choose a foe thus cement their unity.
They can be found on the Left and on the Right. In France, nowadays, they are effectively on both sides, as far as one can talk about "sides" when observing such unanimity and converging outlook.
They designated their foe.
It's America, object of their catharsis, source and solution of all their problems, receptacle of all their fantasizing, reflecting a necessarily distorted image which they turn into the exhaustive matrix of their ideology and the absolving excuse of their own intellectual duplicity.
On this newborn XXIst century, they're converging anew and, even though they still consider each others fiercely opposed, they're capable of dramatically stupendous spontaneous unions, bringing together a crushing majority of the French people, as we just saw all along the Iraqi crisis.
In 1944, Friedrich A. Hayek, observing the advent of the lugubrious doctrine emerging in Germany between the two world wars, wrote¹:
This evolution of Germany's thought was perfectly retraced recently by Mr. R. D. Butter in his study on the "Roots of National Socialism". A rather anguishing feeling emanates from this work: one can see that National Socialist ideas, hardly concealed, kept reappearing periodically over the last 150 years. Nonetheless, their importance shouldn't be overestimated in Germany before 1914. They represented nothing but a trend among others in the public opinion of a country where the most diverse tendencies abounded, more than anywhere else. Only a small minority represented the pre-Nazi trend, and were the object of general contempt from the great majority, as it was the case in other countries.The great antagonist, for the German Socialists of this era, was England and her:
How could this reactionary minority's conception obtain the endorsement of the great majority of the Germans and most of all, the entire youth? Defeat, war and post-war sufferings, and the nationalist wave aren't sufficient to explain. Capitalist reaction against Socialist advance, as suggested by so many people, wasn't the cause either. On the contrary, those ideas were above all supported by Socialists. It's not the middle class that contributed to their attainment, but the lack of a strong one.
The doctrines that guided the last generation's ruling class in Germany weren't opposed to the Socialist elements of Marxism but to its liberal elements, internationalism and democracy. And as it became clearer that these elements opposed the accomplishing of Socialism, Socialists on the Left approached more and more those of the Right. It's the union of anti-Capitalist forces on the Left and on the Right, the merger of socialisms, radical and conservative, that put an end to Liberalism in Germany.
(...) Starting in 1914, masters loomed up from within the ranks of Marxist Socialism and led not the conservative and reactionaries anymore, but the manual workers and the idealist youth to National-Socialism. It's only at that point that the National-Socialist tide swelled up to climax and became Hitlerian doctrine. The 1914 warlike hysteria that, precisely because of the German defeat, never healed completely, is the origin of the modern evolution that produced National-Socialism, broadly sustained during this period of time, by former Socialists.
(...) English individualism, according to which a State endowed with a weak government would be a liberal State and that regards any restriction of individual liberty as an effect of autocracy and militarism. »And when the junction happen, in a dramatically stupendous spontaneous union, with the Prussian ideal - they would nevertheless consider themselves fiercely opposed with - Hayek observes that Moeller van den Bruck reach the last step towards National-Socialism by proclaiming war between Liberalism and Socialism, rejoicing over the fact that:
Paul Lentsch, Three years of world revolution¹
(...) there are no liberals in Germany today; there are young revolutionaries, there are young conservatives. But who would want to be a liberal? (...) Liberalism represents a philosophy from which the German youth turns away now, with nausea, with anger, with disdain because nothing is more distant from her own philosophy, nothing repulse her more than this conception of life. The German youth recognizes the liberal as her archetypal enemy.Making their archetypal enemy out of the archetypal humanist philosophy, the German Socialism and the German youth then had no rest until they gave a new concrete echo to the abomination of the crime against humanity concept.
Now keep Capitalism, Liberalism, Socialism and Nationalism as is, replace England with America, Marxist internationalism with globalization of free trade (daring, I know), observe the spontaneity with which falsely opposed factions suddenly unite and take communion in the same hatred for individual liberties and Capitalism, add the serious economic crisis France is heading too at forced march, almost voluntarily and you will end up, sixty years later, with the secular recipe of a new genocide and the return of an ancient enemy.
We have seen the signs on the wall and it seems that we are ignoring them once again.
They have no memory, for their thought rest on permanent mendacity. Ours is too short sometimes.
Shame on us.
¹Translated from Hayek's Road to Serfdom (French edition) by the dissident frogman. Actual text may differ in the style but hopefully not in the sense.
Do yourself a favor: read this book.
Sadly enough, sixty years later it's still terribly relevant. Read it, understand what can lead our societies to this accursed road and how we can avoid it.
A precision: the term "Liberalism" in this post is used in its European meaning (Classical Liberalism).
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