The Kerplunk Freedom Graph

A clear inverse relationship exists between the level of government control and individual freedom, which is why Western Europe is experiencing the social problems that it is. Society needs strong common values to tie communities together. However, in post-modern Europe values are now completely relative with the result that not only do communities not trust each other or work coherently together for the common good but also certain immigrant groups, of which Muslims are the most glaring example, use the incumbent society's tolerance against it in order to gain concessions and impose their own values on the majority. In this morass of competing values there's only one organisation that can direct society - government - with the result that more and more laws are passed resulting in a reduction of individual liberty.

This political penchant for passing laws so that society doesn't have to be responsible for maintaining strong values is one reason that I see the potential for a currently 'free' European country becoming a fascist state in the medium-term.

As I pointed out in comments a day or so ago, fascism has been recast by leftist intellectuals as a right wing political construct, chiefly in order to remove from the left the guilt of the Holocaust. They've invested heavily in setting up opposites to their ideology so that socialism is the opponent of capitalism, for example. This intellectual sleight of hand is typical of the left's need to create opposition in order to sustain their endeavour.

Take a fully functioning democracy, for example the UK, in which school children as young as ten end up in court for calling their opponent a 'Paki' in a schoolyard fight or a teenage girl is charged with racist crimes for complaining at school that she couldn't understand the study group she had been placed in on the not unreasonable grounds that the rest of the group were from Pakistan and all speaking Urdu, and add to that democracy an increasing level of government intervention in people's lives due to so called 'hate speech' laws, environmentalist causes including reducing garbage pick ups to once a fortnight, city inspectors looking through people's garbage to make sure they're recycling properly and a plan to publicly shame high energy users and ask yourself this question; are people more free or less free than they were before?

From that point it's not too far a step leftward into fascism in which government, supported by the military, dictates how much of what product is needed - which we're already seeing with the self-destructive response to the global warming myth - but allows the market to, on the whole, set prices. From there it's not too far a step into socialism in which major businesses are gradually subsumed by the state (as Venezuela is doing) and, of course, from there it's only a short step into communism at which point the state controls everything.

Thus, fascism is a leftist political construct.

It's difficult for the post-modern left to accept that those who were previously called liberal are now called conservative. Today's conservative believes in individual liberty and a non-coercive, functioning society. We are prepared to give up some personal freedoms in order to ensure our nation's security, provide infrastructure and deliver health and education services etc but want individuals to take responsibility for themselves and for the state to only ever be the provider of last resort.


Click to embiggen

From the graph it's clear that the opposite of communism is anarchy. That clearly makes sense. The opposite of fascism is libertarianism. That also makes sense with each doctrine's emphasis on the role of government; fascism more intervention, libertarianism less intervention.

Given the left's predilection for resorting to ad hominem labels, it will come as a surprise that someone would claim that fascism is part of the prism of left wing ideologies. Naturally, they will reject the claim out of hand because it doesn't comport with their understanding of the world and themselves. That's what happens when people embrace the intellectually immature philosophy of left wing politics; reality is the first casualty.

As the saying goes - being conservative means that I don't need to get up in the morning and live a lie. No wonder that, when polled, those on the right come out as being more happy and content than those on the left.