World War II is Over (Supposedly)

I. INTRODUCTION

September 2, 2020, marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the bloodiest conflict in human history. It has sometimes been nicknamed “The Last Good War,” though I’m inclined to think that a better appellation would be “The Worst Thing That Ever Happened.”

I began composing this essay in preparation for that date, and herein, I will do something that I seldom bother to do (and the reasons for that will be explained later): Criticize Fascism and National Socialism (as well as Communism, and yes, even Capitalism).

To start with, it should be understood that the Second World War was largely a three-way clash between the major ideologies and worldviews that sought to dominate the world in the Twentieth Century -- Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism. First of all, by “Liberalism” I mean, roughly, “Democracy + Capitalism.” The definition of that term has been corrupted in recent times (particularly in the U.S.), though this is its proper meaning, and that’s how I’ll be using it.

Liberalism gradually became the dominant order throughout most of the Western world, and made inroads at dominating the entire world, throughout the years of European colonial expansion and the Industrial Revolution. The first new variety of opposition it faced (as opposed to its clashes with older, traditional, localized cultures) came in the form of Communism, which arose in the mid-19th Century from the collected ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. The struggle between Liberalism and Communism continues to this day, and has been a major factor in the last 150 years or so of world history.

Fascism started to slowly emerge onto the scene a few decades later, around the end of the 19th Century, and then really coalesced in the 1920’s. Which is pretty much what propitiated WWII, since Fascism was opposed to both Liberalism and Communism.

(For the purposes of this essay, “Fascism” is going to be defined somewhat loosely as “all the stuff that the Axis countries believed and agreed upon.” Yes, some might have academic disagreements and argue that Mussolini’s Italian variety was the only “real” Fascism and that German National Socialism and Japanese Showa Imperialism were different things, but they were certainly similar enough for these three countries and their puppet states to ally with each other against everyone else, were they not?)

II. KILL EVERYBODY (JUST TO BE SAFE)

Let us use the metaphor of a human body and the disease of cancer to describe the interrelationship between these three ideologies.

Liberalism (especially the “Capitalism” aspect of it) may be likened to a person who likes to smoke cigarettes, eat tons of processed red meat, sit out in the sun all day without UV protection, breathe polluted air, and stand too close to the microwave. This produces free radicals -- the cell-corrupting unstable molecules that cause aging and, in many cases, cancer. The term “radicals” is ironically appropriate since in our political metaphor, these corrupted cells correspond to people we call “Leftists,” a.k.a. people who are either actively Communist or who are content to act as “useful idiots” for Communism. (Capitalism tends to create wealth inequality, stressful work environments, materialistic anomie, and other such unpleasant things, which is why some people get sufficiently angry to subscribe to Marxism, despite the pervasive evidence that Marxism always takes societies “from bad to worse” whenever it attains power.)

Communism, therefore, is cancer itself. It is the malignant by-product of the Liberal organism’s bad habits, and it will kill said organism once it becomes dominant.

People who are diagnosed with cancerous tumors tend to want to cure themselves (unsurprisingly). Most of the Western countries were able, more or less, to stop the spread of Marxism in ways that could be likened to sensible cancer treatments, though so long as Liberalism and Capitalism retain their flaws and stupidities, new free radicals will continue to spawn; the danger will remain.

Fascism, on the other hand, may be likened to trying to cure cancer by performing home surgery on a tumor with a butcher knife and no anesthetic. Or to simply upturning a can of gasoline and lighting oneself on fire. It is a psychotic overreaction that ultimately defeats itself through its excesses.

(Now would be a good time to address the misinterpretation of Mussolini’s famous “Fascism might as well be called Corporatism” quote. In his day, “corporatism” basically meant “any form of collective activity” and he mostly had in mind things like labor unions and militarized political parties, though to some extent business corporations could apply as well. Thus, it’s an erroneous oversimplification to assert that any society where business corporations have significant influence or receive government subsidies is automatically “Fascist.”)

What were the characteristics of the countries that went Fascist, as opposed to the countries that didn’t? Italy is a complex case, and some of the smaller Axis satellite countries during the war (Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Ukraine, Vichy France, as well as their halfhearted pseudo-allies in Spain) were essentially just opportunist juntas that triumphed with the help of the more powerful nations. The two big ones, of course, were Germany and Japan. Let’s focus on those.

Both Germany and Japan were alike in these ways: They were middle-sized countries, big enough to be significant on the world stage, but noticeably smaller and weaker than their soon-to-be chief opponents (China, the Soviet Union, the British Empire, and the United States). They had strong militaristic traditions and their experiments with democracy had been both recent and highly tentative. They were industrialized, but their economies were precarious. In short, they were sort of like the aggressive mid-level gang member who knows that the alpha-leader guy can crush him, so out of a mixture of paranoia and ambition, he tries to overwhelm Alpha Guy with quick, sudden, vicious attacks in the hope of claiming his position. Of course, the attack fails to put the bigger guy down for the count, and he retaliates. Thus, the jumpy mid-level gangster’s fear of being stomped becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Especially since the extreme nastiness of his methods only makes the big alpha-guy that much more pissed off.)

So, the Axis was in fact the “underdog” during the whole war, though most sane people are glad they didn’t win for the obvious reason that they were complete bastards. In fact, the reason they didn’t seem like the underdog at first was because their initial assaults were mainly focused on countries who weren’t really prepared for war (such as most of Western Europe), or who, despite their greater population size, were badly disorganized and in no condition to fight back effectively (yet) anyway -- meaning the USSR and China. The former due to Stalin’s purges and general Soviet corruption and incompetence; the latter because China was already involved in a post-colonial civil war between the forces of Liberalism led by Chiang Kai-Shek and the forces of Communism led by Mao Zedong. Massive though they were, Russia and China were easy prey for people who had decided that the only way they could secure their own future was through rapid, systematic, and overwhelming violence.

Hence, when all of the casualties of the entire war were tallied up, around HALF of the overall deaths fell into the category of “Allied Civilians.” And that, kids, is why most people do NOT have a particularly good opinion of the Axis.

(Communist regimes have, over the past century, racked up a significantly higher body count  -- more than 100 million souls -- than Fascist ones did, but the Fascists killed more people in a short span of time which is part of why the Axis bloodthirst remains so shocking. Of course, that also means that people who lived under Communism had to suffer for a lot longer.)

We in North America tend to hear a lot about D-Day and the Pacific, and some of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers went through a lot of hardship in the course of winning the war. Some of them didn’t come back. Britain was besieged and bombed, and the people of the UK struggled and suffered. And yet, if you look at the heaviest fighting and the biggest death tolls, World War II was predominantly two simultaneous conflicts amongst four countries: Germany vs. the USSR, and Japan vs. China. Everyone else was kind of peripheral. (In fact, even if you break WWII down into its sub-theaters, the Soviet-German War and the Second Sino-Japanese War still end up as the two bloodiest conflicts in history.)

Look, for example, at Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. As reprehensible as Stalin and Communism in general were, this was essentially a gigantic massacre on a level not seen since Genghis Khan. Hitler issued extremely vague orders that his troops were to “eliminate all Jewish Bolsheviks,” and given the strident tone of his government, this was generally interpreted to mean something along the lines of “KILL EVERYBODY, just to be safe.” The scale of homicide to be carried out was so vast that the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS were, in some cases, freeing local murderers from prison to deputize them into doing the dirty work. A German report from the period revealed a certain amount of hand-wringing over the fact that the Third Reich’s troops were having “psychological problems” associated with the performance of their “duties,” with the authorities trying to concoct an easier way for the poor guys on the ground to depopulate a continent. Out of all the laundry-list of horrors that has emerged from the war, this, more than anything else, is the one that makes me physically ill just to contemplate. Because, I think, it sheds light on the fact that no one in charge really stopped to think that maybe, if their soldiers were consistently being traumatized by what they were being ordered to do, just maybe this suggested that the entire paradigm they were operating under had something fundamentally wrong with it.

(In the West, we don’t hear as much about what was going on in Asia, but Imperial Japan’s behavior towards China, Korea, the Philippines, Indochina, and the rest of the Pacific Rim was virtually identical to what I described in the above paragraph. Feel free to look up the Nanking Massacre for verification, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Where it gets even more horror-film-esque is when one considers that the Axis countries knew, well before the end, that they were doomed. There was no way that two medium-sized countries with resource shortages, along with a few smaller hangers-on, could defeat four huge empires AND the entire rest of the planet in a protracted fight. So what did they do? Hurry up and try to murder even more people before the war ended.

Why? What the hell were they thinking?

Calling WWII the “Last Good War” seems odd to me. It’s apparently the product of some kind of nostalgic idealization that wants to paint this conflict as the end of an era when Good fought against Evil, but then ever since then things have become “complicated” and “morally grey.” This is nonsense.

First of all, in addition to the fact that one of the foremost Allied countries was a brutal Communist dictatorship that was about as bad as the Fascist dictatorships, “our side” also included a bunch of sleazy Chinese warlords and Stalin-sympathizing terrorist partisans. And, of course, there was the fact that the U.S. military firebombed Dresden and nuclear-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which may have been justifiable under the HORRIBLE circumstances of the war, even if not justifiable under most any other circumstances). And Roosevelt’s infamous decision to inter all Japanese-Americans while the government conveniently seized their property. AND, the fact that Winston Churchill pulled so much food out of India that he created an artificial famine that killed about six million people (a number which sounds kind of familiar) -- and not even as a desperation move, but as a mere precaution. Churchill wanted to make sure his allies in Europe had “extra stores” of provisions, regardless of the fate of South Asia.

Second, again, while the naked psychopathy of the Axis forces demanded that they be opposed (I’m definitely not trying to argue that the Allied countries were somehow in the wrong for fighting the war to begin with), how much goodness and glory is there really to be found in putting down a rabid dog? The Fascist world rebellion, at the end of the day, was analogous to a man who gives up on life, murders his whole family plus a couple of neighbors, and then runs out into the street waving a gun around so as to commit “suicide by cop.” The police officers who are more or less forced to execute this individual probably don’t enjoy the task much.

III. THAT WHICH IS OBVIOUS

So, given all of the above: MOST PEOPLE IN WESTERN SOCIETY ARE WELL AWARE THAT FASCISM IS BAD. YES, WE KNOW THIS. I typically don’t talk about it much because…

A) I consider it redundant, and

B) Certain people these days have hijacked the subject in service to their own ulterior agenda.

Sometimes it is worthwhile to reiterate that which is OBVIOUS, which is part of why I’m writing this. But let’s just say that, as far as I’m concerned, running around advertising oneself as “anti-fascist” is like expecting to receive a medal and a booklet of free-lunch coupons just because you wash your hands after you wipe your ass. You don’t get any points for doing the normal, basic stuff that everyone already does. People who make a career or hobby out of “opposing Fascism” -- you know, 75 years after Fascism ceased to be a major threat -- are essentially the laziest sort of scavengers. They want to feel special for performing the simplest act imaginable and taking aim at the easiest possible targets.

Or, alternately, they want people to give them money for doing something that they think no one will ever disagree with, which suggests that their chief motivation is a steady stream of income. There are entire acronym-organizations devoted to this sort of SCAM. Some of which keep getting cited by the media as “experts,” as though said organizations didn’t have a blatant financial motive and were acting purely out of the goodness of their hearts.

As a brief aside (this doesn’t really “fit” very well into the rest of the essay, but it’s worth mentioning, so I’m just going to throw it in here): One can make a surprisingly good case that Fascism is still a major world problem… but not really a Western one. Rather, it is nowadays primarily located within the Islamic civilization. (Baathism, the ideology of Saddam Hussein, was quite literally envisioned as a form of “Arab National Socialism,” and an awful lot of Baathists ended up in leadership positions in ISIS, which has engaged in such flagrantly Nazi-like behaviors as attempted genocide, among other such charming activities.) However, that opens a gigantic can of worms that is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice to say that the West’s recent clashes with quasi-fascistic elements from the Islamic world are probably not the last we’ll see of them, though that conflict does seem to have gone into remission (at least temporarily).

And yet, Western Fascist apologism does exist. It’s rare and hardly anyone pays serious attention to it (see Point A, above), but it’s out there. I will briefly address this just to get it out of the way.

Usually when someone tries to come up with reasons why the Axis were secretly the Good Guys of WWII, it’s for one of the following reasons, or a combination thereof:

1) Because they agree with some of the non-insane shit that the Axis leaders said (the original Fascists made a few good points, but also made a lot of really bad ones),

2) Because they have a grudge against the countries associated with the Allies and/or the people the Axis hated, or

3) Because they’re edgelords. That’s about it, really.

Hence, one will occasionally encounter people ranting about how, for example, Hitler wanted to free his country from the ravages of the international banking system as well as the depredations of Marxists (which he crudely flanderized into a conspiracy theory about how “The Jews[TM]” were behind both Capitalism and Communism, thus leading to the Nazis’ belief that random peasant yeshiva students in some village in rural Ukraine had to be destroyed in order to protect Germany from… stuff?). It’s true that Hitler made some quasi-legitimate criticisms of banks and Communists and such; the problem is that his method for dealing with them involved, you know, ALL THE OTHER STUFF HE DID, which was, shall we say, RATHER difficult to defend. If you want to criticize the problems associated with high finance and Bolshevism/Maoism for “sane” reasons, go for it. Just don’t associate it with a crazy and murderous regime that ended in complete and utter disaster for everyone involved. Why would you bother to do that? Nazism was objectively a fiasco. (Not least for the Germans themselves, and certainly for the various people who ended up in their crosshairs.)

Similarly, some people will vaguely defend the Axis simply because they hate Britain, Russia, China, or America, and figure that the enemy of their enemy is their friend (which, in fairness, is the same mentality that made the USA and UK work together with the Soviet Union until five minutes after the World War ended, at which point the Cold War began.) Related to this, we have the individuals who actually believe the monomaniacal conspiracy theories about The Jews[TM] and attempt to blame them for all the ills of modern society. (Just like how Communists blame Capitalism for everything, or certain minority-group activists blame Whiteness for everything, etc.)

Finally, edgelords. People are scared of the swastika, so some kids will figure that “scary = powerful” and paste it onto themselves along similar lines as they would with, say, a pentagram or a skull or whatnot, because they think it looks cool and badass and rebellious. This is definitely not recommended, but most of the foolish individuals who do this will grow out of it if they don’t do anything stupid/evil first. But some people seem destined to spend their whole lives languishing in weird cults that thrive on a perpetual grudge against society. (I’ve noticed that the majority of neo-Nazis seem to come from urban areas where white people are a minority, whereas most rural and suburban whites regard neo-Nazism as… a weird cult with a grudge against society. This might be worth further examination, but it, too, is beyond the scope of this essay.)

IV. BUT, BUT EVERYONE IS ANTI-FASCIST

Speaking of weird cults, and referencing my point B, above, about “anti-fascism” being hijacked by those with ulterior motives…

There is a bloc of people in our society whose ideas are fundamentally insane, relatively unpopular, and virtually indefensible except when they can cleverly hide them behind stuff that they think no one would dare oppose or disagree with. It’s like when the more vehement of the anti-abortion activists try to cloak their religious fanaticism by saying that they’re “trying to stop babies from being murdered.” OH NO! BETTER GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT AND PUT THEM IN CHARGE OF EVERYTHING, BECAUSE NO ONE WANTS TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH CHILD MURDER! GOSH.

Our society is basically Liberal. The West -- meaning North America, Oceania, and Western Europe -- operates its entire civilization on the foundation of Democracy + Capitalism, and has for centuries now. Democracy and Capitalism are imperfect; hardly a week goes by when I don’t find myself sighing raggedly with exasperation at their flaws and wondering how they might be improved. The one thing I am certain of, though, is that Liberalism is better than Communism or Fascism. Like I said, it’s occasionally worthwhile to reiterate the obvious.

So… who is this bloc? This unpleasant group who know that the only way they can possibly win is to pretend like they are the first line of defense against Fascism (which, as we’ve already established, virtually everyone thinks is Very Bad).

Communists, of course. The usual, inherent adversaries of our culture and our civilization. The adherents of a movement that was born for no other purpose than to overthrow Liberalism. Of course, they often don’t specifically call themselves by name anymore, and the locus of their propaganda has shifted -- they now prefer to focus on race and gender more than socioeconomic class. Although (tellingly) pure, unadulterated, 100%-Marxist rhetoric on economics has a mysterious way of popping up, over and over again, the more they speak about their vision for society… 

World War II was one of the only times in history in which Communists got to pretend to be the good guys, and were even sort of successful at something worthwhile. Fascism (despite itself being largely a rabid overreaction to Marxism) went so far off the deep end so quickly that Liberals were, briefly, willing to work together with Communists and sort of tolerate their version of totalitarianism.

Oh, the nostalgia! Oh, how Commies wish that The Worst Thing That Ever Happened -- the bloodiest and most awful event in human history -- would happen again, so that they get to be the good guys fighting the eeeeevil Fascists!

It is interesting to note that present-day left-wingers often seem to have something analogous to Tourette’s Syndrome when it comes to calling things “Fascist,” or terms that they consider closely related to Fascism, like “racist,” “Nazi,” “white supremacist,” and so forth. Observing them online, they are constantly waxing masturbatory about all the violence they would like to perpetrate against people they believe they can label with these terms.

It’s almost as though they have some sort of grudge against Capitalist society (see the thing about “free radicals,” above). It’s almost as though they doubt their own ability to achieve happiness in Liberal society, and consequently are filled with hatred and aggression, and are desperately seeking a way to justify it.

Leon Trotsky, one of the original Bolsheviks, defined Fascism as simply a “defense mechanism” of Capitalism, and his views on how to fight it were based on the idea that Fascism was ultimately just an obstruction that would have to be kicked aside on the way to overthrowing Liberalism. There you have it, right from the horse’s mouth. This Is What Communists Actually Believe.

The original Fascists, by inserting themselves into the preexisting conflict between Liberalism and Communism and being as cruel and destructive as they were, inadvertently gave the Commies the mother of all boons. Communism has arguably benefited more from Fascism than it ever benefited from its own propaganda. (Along similar lines, we may mention Anton LaVey’s amusing statement that “Satan is the best friend the Church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years.”)

Marxist regimes tend to openly triumph only in countries that are profoundly dysfunctional to begin with, such as late Tsarist Russia, Cuba under Batista, Cambodia after the French occupation fell apart, etc. In countries that aren’t complete basket cases, they are forced to practice the Motte-and-Bailey Fallacy by only advocating full Marxism when they think they can get away with it, and then, if they encounter pushback, retreating to the safer and easier position of advocating “Democratic Socialism.” Or, of course, “anti-fascism.”

(The Frankfurt School of Social Research, a German Marxist Psychological group, began their studies by trying to rank human thoughts and behaviors on a scale that went from “Fascist” at one end to “Revolutionary” at the other, with the latter term being used in a specifically pro-Communist context. After they fled to America, they made a slight public-relations adjustment by keeping most of their ideas intact, but deleting the word “Revolutionary” and replacing it with “Liberal” or “Democrat,” rebranding themselves as champions of “Liberal Democracy” contra Fascism. The Frankfurt School did contribute some relatively worthwhile research to the field of Psychology and there are conspiracy theories about them which I consider malicious and/or exaggerated, but the example of how they finagled their terminology is useful in illustrating how Communists often pretend to be mere “left-liberals” to avoid scaring normal people.)

To sum up the above, Communism is primarily the enemy of Liberalism. But in a sterling case of “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” it pretends to be Liberalism’s trusty pal, standing against “the Nazis,” so that Liberalism will drop its guard and allow itself to be stabbed in the back.

We see this.

We see this every time a member/supporter of Antifa attacks mainstream conservatives, libertarians, cops just doing their jobs, or random unaffiliated people who happen to be in the way, all the while proclaiming to be “protecting the community” on grounds that the above groups are planning to launch a major genocide against “marginalized/vulnerable people” any minute now. Many of them consider themselves Anarchists rather than Communists, which is interesting when one considers that 1) Antifa was originally the paramilitary street wing of the German Communist Party, and 2) in Russia, the Bolsheviks immediately crushed and annihilated every Anarchist they could get their hands on as soon as the Tsarist forces were defeated.

We see this every time members of the entertainment industry or entertainment journalism (who in many cases got their jobs after taking lots of college classes with titles like “Intersectional Feminism in Popular Film: Decolonizing the White-Heteronormative Assumptions of Movie Gender Roles”) constantly create or advocate for works that “push boundaries” in the form of deliberately trying to annoy the Liberal majority with various identity-politics-focused nonsense, often shoehorned into art where it doesn’t belong… and then use the fans’ reaction to their deliberate provocation as an excuse to posture about how the “racist Nazi redneck misogynists” are mad, while contrapositioning their own agenda as more enlightened. (This is the definition of “passive aggression” -- prodding someone until they “snap” and then using the incident to make them look like the bad guy. It is the same tactic that Antifa uses in trying to get the cops to “abuse” them so that they can then proclaim themselves the victims of the “Fascist police state.”)

We see this every time a leftist politician advocates mass wealth transfer, typically under the guise of something like “reparations” for the past sins of “systemic racism,” or as part of an initiative to combat “climate change” that conveniently includes large amounts of quintessentially socialist rhetoric in the fine print. In practice, these initiatives end up mainly just securing votes for the politicians who advance them while funneling money to bureaucrats or professional “activist” groups. And if they encounter pushback, they respond with hysterical calls for a militarized, Orwellian, draconian response… justified by the necessity, OF COURSE, of combating “white supremacist domestic terrorism” (a term which certain individuals try to apply even to libertarians, i.e. people whose whole philosophy can be summed up as “don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you”). Such politicians are increasingly found in the establishments of almost every major industrialized country.

It says something interesting about Leftism/Socialism/Communism when Fascism, an awful ideology that propitiated the most horrific global event since the Mongol Conquests or the Black Death, ended up being a good thing for the overall agenda of Marxists. Adolf Hitler is the best friend that modern Leftism ever had, as he has kept the Church of Leftism in business all these years.

V. IT’S THE TOTALITARIANISM, STUPID

Capitalism and Liberalism are not perfect, and I never said they were. They have at times been nearly as bad as their adversaries (but usually not). Most of the problems that are specific to the modern world arrived alongside Liberalism. (Obviously, this still leaves all the other problems that humanity has always faced, regardless of political or economic system, since the dawn of our species.)

However, there is another aspect of Communist propaganda that we must dismantle before we wrap things up here. Since WWII, Marxism has tended to lump all of its opposition under the heading of “Fascism” for P.R. reasons. But this is a front. Behind it lies a similar construct: Marxism, at its core, lumps every form of injustice and suffering in human history under the heading of “Capitalism.” (And, remember, Marxism officially considers Fascism to be a subtype of Capitalism.) Marxists think that the priest-kings of the ancient world, the feudal overlords of the medieval world, and the CEOs of the modern world are all exactly the same thing, and that anyone who disagrees with this conflation is a “Fascist bootlicker.”

And since Communism exists to oppose all of this stuff, supposedly, it can be said that, in the Marxist worldview, everything that isn’t specifically Marxist is bad. It is possible to find Commies saying, with a straight face, that they consider “neutrality” and “centrism” to be veiled forms of Fascio-Capitalistic oppression.

This is the mindset to which Hannah Arendt referred when she wrote about both the Stalin and Hitler regimes being totalitarian. They are ideologies which claim a single “total” answer to all questions. Which demand that everything, absolutely everything, revolve “totally” around a single, central political idea. (Leftists have tried to cancel or discourage usage of the term and concept of “totalitarianism” since it interferes with their propaganda when people notice how similar Fascism and Communism actually are in practice.)

In Fascism (and especially in National Socialism), the “total idea” is of tribalistic and evolutionary struggle. In Communism, the “total idea” is of class struggle and economic inequality (which in more recent times has overlapped with notions pertaining to racism and sexism). Or, to put it another way, both are obsessed to an insane degree with extremely primitive, almost animalistic pursuits. Breeding in the case of Fascism, and feeding in the case of Communism.

Fascists are the gangs of cavemen who raided their neighbors for mates, killing everyone except the fertile women. They are the primordial stepfathers who bashed in the heads of their stepchildren so that their own biological offspring would have less competition. They are terrified of the humiliation of not being The Alpha and of the long-term failure of their genetic line.

Communists are the gangs of cavemen who raided their neighbors for food, clothing, tools, and shiny objects, killing everyone and taking their stuff. They are the primordial wannabe priests threatening curses upon those who don’t give them enough donations, and willing to poison people to back up their threats. They are terrified of the humiliation of not being rich and comfortable and important, of being forced out of “respectable society” to beg for scraps, and of even the remotest possibility of individual death via not having enough resources.

Liberalism tries (with mixed success) to impose limits on the worst excesses of primitive behaviors (and to partially soften the effects of natural calamities), but, within certain boundaries, leaves people alone to figure things out for themselves. It gives people the opportunity to succeed, but also allows them to fail. This is intolerable to the totalitarian mindset, which wants success to be guaranteed and is willing to submerge itself into a collectivized tyranny in order to obtain that guarantee.

It is interesting to note, however, that early Fascism borrowed many of its organizational and propagandistic tactics from Marxism (and a lot of Blackshirts and Brownshirts were ex-Communists). They essentially took the Commie playbook and used Find-and-Replace on the terms they didn’t like, but kept most of it the same. (Later, they also compromised with financial and aristocratic elites rather than simply killing them the way the Commies did.)

And, furthermore, present-day neo-Communism has borrowed Fascism’s obsession with race, breeding, and genetics. Examples of this basic and obvious fact hardly need be given, though I would point out that the Left is fond of using highly sexualized propaganda against “the bourgeoisie” (frequently portrayed as weak and sexually unappealing next to the “virile” proletariat) which echoes the propaganda which Hitler and Goebbels used to employ against “inferior races.” And it is worth highlighting that in the West, the majority population of “white people” is often vaguely associated with “the Right” whereas the various minority populations tend to be vaguely associated with “the Left” (though individual results may vary widely) -- yet, most Black or Mestizo supremacist organizations check off all the boxes necessary to be considered “neo-Nazis.” Aside from the relatively insignificant fact of their skin color, that is.

Meanwhile, modern feminism frequently takes the form of a Lysistrata-style sexual revolt against men for either not being sufficiently “exciting” for women’s tastes (a la the mate-raiding cavemen of yore), or for not giving women enough free resources (a la the beggar-priests of antiquity). Or some combination thereof. Women who are considered less attractive, or who are less interested in hetero sex, when heavily involved in politics, sometimes seem to consider it of paramount importance to work towards the sexual failure of men by convincing other, more-attractive women that men are “oppressing” them, thus lessening the pain of their own disappointments.

Liberalism is insufferable to totalitarians, because in permitting Nature to mostly run its course within certain moderately-wide boundaries, it includes the possibility of disappointment, pain, and failure (albeit alongside the possibility of success and joy). Totalitarianism promises people success; all they have to do is join the hivemind, take over the world, and impose total control over every single aspect of reality, remaking the Earth in the image of their abstract ideology and steamrolling Nature itself when necessary.

Makes perfect sense, when you think about it. Why go to the trouble of changing yourself and/or playing to your own strengths, adapting to your situation, when you can just amalgamate with other people who want to edit reality in ways that you think will conveniently benefit you?

VI. CONCLUSION

World War II was a three-way clash between Liberalism and the two chief modern forms of Totalitarianism. (In my opinion, religious fundamentalism or theocracy represents another type, but it predates modern politics and discussion of its role in world history is beyond the scope of this essay. Of course, Fascism and Communism both heavily resemble theocratic religion, anyway, minus the supernatural element; and Islamic fundamentalism is arguably Fascist.) Fascism was definitely the loser of this titanic conflict, but the remaining struggle between Liberalism and Communism has yet to be decided.

Communism absorbed many elements of Fascism after the war; furthermore, as part of its “Long March Through the Institutions” (the program, as advocated by Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Rudi Dutschke, of taking over organizations in Liberal society and pushing them towards Marxist thought) it has increasingly begun to turn Western and indeed global society against itself. Ironically, often in the name of “opposing Fascism,” insofar as this feeds its ultimate goal of world domination. The true Communists don’t care if they have to use Capitalistic or Fascistic institutions to bring about their socialized Marxoid utopia. The important thing is that they get to club people and take their stuff, or threaten to curse/poison people unless they receive lots of donations and kowtows of deference to their smartness and importance.

Whether or not neo-Communism succeeds will depend on whether the people of the world decide to err on the side of freedom, opportunity, and Nature (including the possibility of failure); or on the side of “caution” and oversimplified, pipe-dream guarantees that they will be safe and successful in exchange for total allegiance and conformity.

Since neo-Communism operates on a global scale, the future of human freedom is probably to be found in some form of “National Liberalism.” This should take a fairly hardline stance against overreach by the burgeoning, globalized, econo-securi-state (which is increasingly being taken over from within by de facto Marxists under the guise of “Social Democracy” and “anti-fascism”), yet while guaranteeing the freedoms of Classical Liberalism within its borders. Different versions of National Liberalism can be adapted to different cultures, landscapes, and economies. Different National-Liberal countries can negotiate trade deals with one another, and coexist peacefully side-by-side, without surrendering their liberty or autonomy to a world-spanning, elitist, and crypto-totalitarian order.

And, if we are lucky, the decades to come will not require us to resolve these conflicts, leftover from the events of 75 years past, with anything remotely on the scale of the utter horror that a Third World War would be. God and Nature willing, we can avoid both tyranny and chaos, and preserve civilization without succumbing to the totalitarian lie.

~ Airyaman