Killing History Quotes

“By the late 20th century, the general consensus among most historians attributed the origins of fascism to one of the numerous branches of heretical Marxism that had developed into dictatorship, nationalization, welfarism, and militarism. Later, Sternhell, in The Birth of Fascist Ideology, he took the position that the ‘origins’ of Franco-Italian fascism ideology was ‘Marxism,’ or to be more precise, from ‘a very specific revision of Marxism.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“If people don’t have free agency, they become mere chattel to the herdsman who wields the biggest horsewhip.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“The statist Left’s first move was to alter the meaning of liberalism so as to keep the free Left and the public in a constant state of confusion. They diluted the original principles of liberalism while firing cheap polemical shots, arguing that John Locke’s liberalism had nothing to offer, that it contradicted itself. After all, if the statist Left could not win a fair fight on the philosophical battlefield, it had to resort to chicanery to gain an advantage. One way to accomplish this was to adulterate or falsify the liberal message to render it meaningless while advancing a new, redefined liberalism to replace the old. The deception was successful. The free-Left liberals and their allies had lost the semantic ammunition to defend liberty, and therefore became neutered, defanged, almost defenseless, deprived of the cognitive capability to defend the autonomy of the individual. As for the statist Left, they had to work diligently to ‘defascistize’ historical Fascism, because to do otherwise would force them to face an ugly image in the mirror.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“If socialist regimes work together, trade together, fight together, collaborate, and have fundamentally equivalent ideologies and tactics, they are genealogically related (a sort of Communist-Nazi brotherhood), which could be regarded as a Fascist-Marxist mindset. Of course, these socialist ideologues also fight each like rival siblings”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“There were two French Revolutions—the first stage instigated by free-Left elements imbued with toleration, anti-authoritarianism, secularism, individualism, liberty and the revolutionary individualism of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. The second stage of the French Revolution devolved into a bloody, terroristic dictatorship, an all-powerful state amidst a cult of personality, such as the so-called incorruptible Maximilien Robespierre, in a counter-revolution that was anti-liberal and antithetical to the Lumières movement, which became the Age of Enlightenment.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“What this means is that liberalism had been poisoned by a false definition of liberty, one characterized by an unethical authoritarian demeanor, cast in rigid conformity to authority, obedience to rules, and slave-like submission to the collective, making individual subservient to the group. Instead of questioning authority or challenging state power, the apostles of illiberal positive rights idealize the State as a social panacea. To them, the state is everything, and almost nothing should be outside the state’s jurisdiction. This variant of creeping fascization infected Germany, Italy, and Russia in the first half of the 20th century.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Positive rights require physical force or intimidation in order to enforce these alleged ‘rights.’ In essence, they are faux rights that violate other people’s rights. Positive rights actually don’t exist; they are fictitious, a fraudulent tactic which subverts choice. Rights are not obligations. To physically force someone to give financial benefits to another makes a mockery of the principles of freedom of action, freedom of choice, and the right to be free from aggression. Rather, the license to institute compulsory practices leads to legalized and institutionalized aggression and robbery. Enabling political structures to plunder one in the name of others perverts the meaning of individual human rights.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“To accomplish this herculean feat, governmental bodies captured the legal power to intrude on human affairs in the hope of fixing man’s flawed nature, as though mankind were destined to live on a sterilized Planet Clorox, a land where everything could be made not only perfectly clean but free of risks. Governmental power was bulked up to launch a toxic blend of utopian and draconian measures to outlaw poverty, inequality, and injustice—supposedly. This socioeconomic jihad against liberty emerged after adherents of state-enhanced liberalism revised their ideological arsenal to include ‘positive rights.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“After his arrest and internment in Munich, Hitler turned away from communism and ‘espoused the cause of Social Democracy against that of the Communists.’ He had to disown communism. If he hadn’t he would have likely been executed, imprisoned or banished from Germany.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“After the bourgeoisie, middle class, and merchants instigated the French Revolution and sat on the left side of the aisle in opposition to the authoritarians, their legacy was ignored. The Socialist and nationalist intelligentsia sought to consciously bury the memory of original left-wing middle-class history and sitting arrangements. They mercilessly co-opted the left-wing label from the bourgeoisie revolutionary ‘Free Left,’ and denounced anyone who opposed their social revolution as reactionary or right-wing. These usurpers not only stole the left-wing designation from the bourgeoisie insurgents, but also absconded with their revolutionary ancestry. English historian William Doyle acknowledged this historical thievery, writing that after the French Revolution, the socialists were able to ‘appropriate the left-wing label and… lay exclusive claim to the revolutionary heritage.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Because of Hitler’s penchant for nationalistic Social Democracy and Marxian revolutionary violence, Nazism could be easily identified as a militant Social Democratic movement.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Hitler had allied with the Communist Party of Germany against the Social Democrats in support of a workers’ wage dispute. In that labor dispute, Hitler’s ‘brownshirts’ and red-flag-waving communists marched side by side through the streets of Berlin and damaged any buses whose drivers had failed to participate in the worker’s strike. Alongside the communists, Nazis ripped up tram lines, stood together, ‘shouted in unison,’ and ‘rattled their collecting tins’ to get donations for their strike funds in support of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO) for the communists and National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO) for the Nazis.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Considering their propensity for using street violence to shut down opponents, Hitler and his SA Stormtroopers might be considered as the ultimate social justice warriors of their era. From the very start, Hitler made it plain that social justice was an important attribute to a healthy state. In one of his 1920 speeches, Hitler proclaimed to thousands of Nazi party followers: ‘[W]e do not believe that there could ever exist a state with lasting inner health if it is not built on internal social justice…”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Although Karl Marx… confided that he derived many of his philosophical ideas from the French utopian socialist movement, he also knew that he was adopting an ideological movement rife with xenophobia. Anti-Semitism was so profuse in the French socialist community that historian Zosa Szajkowski concluded in an exhaustive study that he ‘could not find a single word on behalf of Jews in the whole of French socialist literature from 1820 to 1920.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“After the invasion of Poland in 1939, Goebbels framed the war between capitalist England and socialist Germany with this observation: ‘England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people’s state.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Hitler in 1919 took a position in the Communist run Bavarian Soviet Republic, wearing in public a red armband, according to a number of historians including Thomas Weber. And a little later after the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Hitler claimed to be a ‘social democrat.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Despite the fact that three-fourths of Italy’s economic sector was owned by the government by the mid-1930s, most scholars routinely ignored Italian Fascism’s slide into pure Soviet-style socialism, a concentration of state ownership so large that it was only eclipsed by Stalin’s Soviet Union. The conventional definition of socialism is described as a social and economic system characterized by ‘public ownership’ of the ‘means of production.’ On the other hand, fascism is often explained as a social and economic system characterized by ‘public control’ over the ‘agents of production.’ But Mussolini’s regime eventually morphed into Fascist socialism as its means of production was placed under public ownership.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“By June 1919, Mussolini was criticizing Lenin’s handling of the communist revolution in Russia, concerned that he was straying from the tenets of Marxism. Distressed that Lenin was not Marxist enough, Mussolini wrote that his old comrade was ‘the very negation of socialism’ because he had not created a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the socialist party, but only of a few intellectuals who had found the secret of winning power.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Historically, Italian Fascism was founded as a Marxist-leaning party, which some have classified as a form of Fascist-Marxist ideology. From 1914 to at least 1921, Mussolini simultaneously proclaimed himself a Fascist while still adhering to Marxist doctrines and Marxist leaders such as Lenin. In 1914, Mussolini created the Marxist-sounding organization—the Fasci of Revolutionary Action (Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria, FAR). Mussolini’s first Fascist party—the Fascist Revolutionary Party (Partito Fascista Rivoluzionario, PFR)—was founded in 1915. Two years later, Mussolini still considered himself within the Marxist camp, praising the Bolshevik’s 1917 October Revolution, boasting of his camaraderie with Lenin and violent revolution. In the Italian elections of 1919, he publicly compared himself to Lenin, bragging that he was the ‘Lenin of Italy.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Under National Socialism, the state plundered and killed other national groups and races and use their resources to provide Germans with an unsparing welfare-warfare society. Under the alleged international socialism of Marxism, the state plundered and killed other classes to provide comrades with a welfare-warfare society. Both systems, the German’s and the Soviet’s, believed in equality and socialism, but for different collective groups. Although Nazism preached inequality between the races, it placed great significance on equality among true-blooded Germans ̈('Völkisch equality) and the spirit of fraternity.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“On the antithetical side, the fascist Left, along with its German and Italian comrades, detested economic liberalism (capitalism), religion, usury and financial capital (often due to their ‘Jewishness’), the gold standard, free trade, limited government, low taxation, night-watchman government, rule of law, decentralization, state rights, gun rights, self-ownership, free individual choice and individualism.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“The belief that one cannot be fascist in any shape or form liberates the individual to behave as fascist as possible, granting him or her the illusion of anti-fascist sainthood—as has been witnessed with the wildly violent, Fascist-Marxist organizations like the ‘Antifa’ movement. These hateful gangs of revolutionary socialist and anarcho-statist militants are convinced that they are incapable of ever toting the baggage of fascism and therefore can freely be more violently fascist than the average fascist. Thinking they are free of fascist-socialist contamination, they can easily become what they oppose.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“A number of die-hard Marxists have confirmed the mirroring of social totalitarian ideologies. Otto Rühle, a German Left communist and one of the founders of Second International, asserted that Bolshevism is a model for Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. In his 1939 article ‘The Struggle against Fascism Begins with the Struggle against Bolshevism,’ Rühle wrote that ‘Fascism is merely a copy of bolshevism,’ and that it was a ‘political and administrative terror system.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“The best way to differentiate between the two left-wing antagonists is to designate the volitional contingent the ‘free Left,’ and its authoritarian horde as the statist or Fascist Left. The free Left, like the Free French during World War II, comprises anti-authoritarians who felt as though their long-established realm had become occupied by foreign invaders. A logical progression would be to simply remain faithful to the original left-right classification and lump the entire menagerie of authoritarians (Nazis, Fascists, and Communists) into the reactionary ranks of the statist Right.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Proclaiming to be a ‘Left Libertarian,’ [Jeff] Riggenbach pored over the original meaning behind the seating arrangement of the 1791 French Legislative Assembly and noticed that those who favored authoritarian and dictatorial rule sat together on the right side of the aisle. So, under this interpretation, all authoritarians must be recognized as right-wingers, meaning that Communists, Nazis, and Fascists must occupy the same rows of pews even if they carry on like contentious, misbehaving siblings.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“The Girondin bloc also ratified laws ensuring equality in taxation, freedom of worship, and legal equality of punishment, and abolishing serfdom outright, including a 1791 law to emancipate Jewish citizens from unequal treatment. The Girondin-led assembly also granted free people of color full French citizenship and enacted universal voting rights for all adult males, regardless of race, religion, income, property or any other qualification. They even included a pro-gun rights provision in the French Declaration of Rights, which declared that ‘every citizen has the right to keep arms at home and to use them, either for the common defense or for his own defense, against any unlawful attack which may endanger the life, limb, or freedom of one or more citizens.’ Despite the effort, this draft did not make it into the final document.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Yet it was the majority-led Girondins who had spearheaded the revolution and challenged the establishment. They accomplished far more than did the Montagnards. After toppling the king, the Girondins rushed into an abolitionist spree fueled by liberty, dissolving the last vestiges of aristocratic privilege, the system of church tithes, dues owed to local landlords, and personal servitude. The radical liberals also released the peasants from the seigneurial (lord) dues, which helped tenant farmers buy their own private farmland. Next, they turned their abolitionist gun-sights on the guild system that blocked entry to markets, as well as ‘tax farming,’ where private individuals would be licensed to collect taxes for the state while taking a large share for themselves.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'