Quote of the Day: Choose your Poison

 

“There’s nothing sane or scientific about the hells communism creates on the Earth. It’s just as animalistic and base as fascism. It relies on malice and hatred and will to power just as much. It’s just that the communist sanctifies envy, and the fascist sanctifies pride.”Sarah Hoyt

While reading libertarian science fiction author Sarah Hoyt’s blog on the antagonism of fascism and communism, this phrase stuck out to me. Sarah grew up in Portugal during the socialist regime, so she speaks from experience.

Later on in her post, she describes the crossover in the modern left,  with ethnic / LGBTQ? / insert-victim-group-here pride, trust in feelings, and other things from a funhouse-mirror version of fascism. The difference is the sales pitch, not the product, which is always tyrannical government control and stacks of corpses.

When the highest virtue of your nation is a sin, you can hardly expect things to go well.

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  1. OmegaPaladin Moderator
    OmegaPaladin
    @OmegaPaladin

    Sarah Hoyt’s writing is not my taste, honestly, but it is probably the most honest depiction of a libertarian society in the future.


    The Quote of the Day series is the easiest way to start a fun conversation on Ricochet. There are many open days on the September Signup Sheet. We even include tips for finding great quotes, so choose your favorite quote and sign up today!

    • #1
  2. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    OmegaPaladin: Later on in her post, she describes the crossover in the modern left – with ethnic / LGBTQ? / insert victim group here pride, trust in feelings, and other things from a funhouse-mirror version of fascism. The difference is the sales pitch, not the product, which is always tyrannical government control and stacks of corpses.

    Fascism is weird because the Italian version wasn’t racist or anti-semitic. Fascism said that the most important part of you was your group identity to the Country. (Not necessarily the state but the Country which makes it distinct from Communism.) But both ideologies are similar in that the most important part of you isn’t your virtue or excellence but your identity.  

    • #2
  3. JoelB Member
    JoelB
    @JoelB

    This:

    When the highest virtue of your nation is a sin, you can hardly expect things to go well.

    • #3
  4. Seawriter Contributor
    Seawriter
    @Seawriter

    OmegaPaladin: Sarah grew up in Portugal during the Communist regime, so she speaks from experience.

    I believe the Portugal Hoyt grew up in is better described as authoritarian-fascistic than communistic. She was born in 1962 and the Estato Novo was still in control until 1974. After that the Portuguese military was in control for two years until a parliamentary system was instituted. Socialist parties generally got elected in the early years, but I don’t think you could describe Portugal as ever having been ruled by a Communist regime. They were a founding member of NATO. 

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    Fascism is weird because the Italian version wasn’t racist or anti-semitic. Fascism said that the most important part of you was your group identity to the Country. (Not necessarily the state but the Country which makes it distinct from Communism.) But both ideologies are similar in that the most important part of you isn’t your virtue or excellence but your identity.

    Both Communism and Fascism are varieties of Socialism. Communism is international socialism. Fascism is national socialism.

     

    • #4
  5. John H. Member
    John H.
    @JohnH

    Sarah grew up in Portugal during the Communist regime

     

    I didn’t know there’d been one.

     

    Whatever Portugal had in 1962 when Mrs. Hoyt was born, the Carnation Revolution put an end to it in 1974. Or at least I think it did. Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia article about Antonio de Oliveira Salazar:

     

    Opposed to democracy, communism, socialism, anarchism and liberalism, Salazar’s rule was conservative and nationalist in nature. Salazar distanced himself from fascism and Nazism, which he criticized as a “pagan Caesarism” that recognised neither legal nor moral limits.

     

    • #5
  6. Douglas Pratt Coolidge
    Douglas Pratt
    @DouglasPratt

    OmegaPaladin (View Comment):

    Sarah Hoyt’s writing is not my taste, honestly, but it is probably the most honest depiction of a libertarian society in the future.


    The Quote of the Day series is the easiest way to start a fun conversation on Ricochet. There are many open days on the September Signup Sheet. We even include tips for finding great quotes, so choose your favorite quote and sign up today!

    She did a splendid job collaborating with Larry Correia on “Monster Hunter: Guardian.”

    • #6
  7. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    OmegaPaladin: a funhouse-mirror version of fascism

    She says,

    In other words, since fascists vanished, the left has slowly converged with them in theory as well as in practice. I mean, if you think the crony capitalism of China isn’t, in everything but name, the most successful fascist regime on Earth (And it’s not that successful. As Dave Freer told me more than a decade ago, it’s a beautiful lacquered vase. The lacquer hides the cracks.)

    A guy named John Nerst has something to add — I don’t think to contradict, so much as supplement. He believes the two principle components to electoral politics are thrive-survive and coupling-decoupling.

    Thrive-survive means, do we make thriving a priority, or surviving? Coupling-decoupling is harder to sum up, but it describes how we view social obligations, as obligatory, extending even to strangers, or as voluntary?

    The authoritarian worldview on Nerst’s compass is coupled-survive, and fascism the extreme of coupled-survive:

    “Coupled” and “survive” certainly paints a picture. The world is a tough, unforgiving place and we need discipline to navigate it. Open-ended obligations means you can expect to be helped and supported by everyone else — as long as you contribute and conform. We’re a team and you’re a team player. That’s important, because supporting that kind of cohesion on a large scale requires constant work towards unity. Not surprisingly, this quadrant contains a lot of rhetoric comparing the state to a family, evoking feelings of unbounded support, loyalty and duty.

    Nerst notes that communism aspires to be coupled-thrive. But coupled-thrive seems unstable in the real world. He says,

    I’d point out that actually existing communist societies looked pretty similar to fascist ones, despite serious ideological differences. How come? I think that can be resolved by saying that communist societies are in the far left corner in theory; to work they have to be so rich that they can adopt perfect Thrive thinking together with their extreme coupling. But when they aren’t post-scarcity they slide toward a fascist-like structure because they’re confronted with a reality that requires more of a Survive mindset than a “good” version of communism can handle. In other words, fascism is intentionally in the top corner, while communism collapses into it upon contact with scarcity.

    A society focused on letting people thrive rather than survive either has to be post-scarcity, or it has to give people the freedom to choose thriving over surviving, if need be — the freedom to treat their social obligations as something they chose, not something imposed upon them “by society”. Once people start treating social obligations as voluntary, we’ve left the coupled mindset behind, so insisting on a highly coupled worldview in a world with scarce resources tends toward fascism.

    • #7
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