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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.
Published in Group Writing
Sarah Hoyt’s writing is not my taste, honestly, but it is probably the most honest depiction of a libertarian society in the future.
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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.
This:
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.
Both Communism and Fascism are varieties of Socialism. Communism is international socialism. Fascism is national socialism.
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:
She did a splendid job collaborating with Larry Correia on “Monster Hunter: Guardian.”
She says,
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:
Nerst notes that communism aspires to be coupled-thrive. But coupled-thrive seems unstable in the real world. He says,
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.