By Patrice Greanville
As part of our occasional special reports on the right, we’d like to introduce our audience now to Kitty Werthmann, a vigorous octogenarian who currently stumps the country as the renascent right’s new champion for a putative type of libertarian democracy whose real coordinates remain suspiciously murky.
Obviously neither left nor right nor center—Mrs. W’s spiel is not particularly helpful when it comes to defining her own political predilection—listeners to Mrs. W may be excused for wondering aloud what political path she is actually suggesting.
Ms W’s specialty in the deliberate confusionism that clogs America’s mind is to add to it by selling the public the idea that since Hitler was a socialist (sic), any leader, like Barack Obama, for example, putatively dragging the nation kicking and screaming toward “socialism” (sic sic sic) must be a new Hitler in sheep’s clothes. Of course, anyone familiar with the Nazis’ ascent to power knows that they chose to use the word “socialist” —their party’s name was officially the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei —National Socialist Workers Party, NSDAP—precisely because of that label’s popularity among the workers. It was a conscious attempt by the right and the establishment powers behind it at stealing a march from the left, to attract clueless, fearful people to the notion that this strain of rabidly nationalist socialism could be embraced after all since it was patriotic. The ruse worked and the rest is history, as they say, and please forgive the oversimplification.
At any rate I must admit that this line of propaganda by the wing nuts is perhaps one of their best vehicles yet to mislead the clueless—and thereby mobilize them—in the direction of their “solutions” to America’s multitude of self-inflicted political wounds.
Communism and fascism are one and the same
The idea that polar opposites can actually march in the same direction, beholden to the same goals (in this case abominable ones), is one of the oldest fraudulent equations in the American political marketplace. It never seems to go out of fashion because it appeals to simpletons, and it also traps an inordinately high number of victims among the perennial low-info types that abound in America. (Yes, I know, it’s shocking to hear it: ignorance still reigns supreme in America.) Continue reading »
