Historical Parallels Between Extremes
Editorial by Art DeJong, RPSC Member
Recently our local paper published an op-ed disguised as a news story bemoaning the “far right riding high” under Trump. It assumed the usual myth that the “far right” differs significantly from the “far left,” suggesting that sensible people meet the middle. It’s been a hundred years since the turf war over Poland between the “far right” German socialist Nazis and the “far left” Russian socialist communists kicked off World War II, but the beat goes on.
Today, our “far left” young women screaming on campus in their fashionable keffiyehs for the annihilation of the Jews “from the river to the sea” sound like the old “far right” jack-booted Nazis because they are the same.
Stalin’s Communists who slaughtered 20 million oppositional Russians for the good of Mother Russia even outdid Hitler ‘s Nazis who slaughtered 10 million undesirable Germans for the good of the Fatherland. The Lyrics vary, not the tune.
Despite what Communist professors, who took refuge in our academia after that war, told their students, the political battle is not between the “right” and “left” but between the sanctity of the individual and sanctity of the state, between the self-rule of citizens and the totalitarian rule of dictators or socialist collectives.
The great American revolution was not about electing smarter and kinder rulers but creating a system of law that protects the life, liberty, and property of each citizen from both private thugs and the public socialist state. The agonized screams coming from our old Washington socialists tell us that Trump’s young MAGA reformers really do get it right, not wrong.
Art DeJong,
Wisconsin