Tuesday, May 27, 2014

My letter to the NY Times re: UKIP is neither left nor right

Re: Populist Party Gaining Muscle to Push Britain to the Right

Dear Sirs:
It is about time to end the inaccurate labeling of all political parties as either of the left or of the right.  The ultra left is always linked with Soviet communist and the ultra right is always linked to Nazi fascism.  The laymen is left to believe that there is no other paradigm for government and that most governments fall somewhere between the two extremes.  Your recent article about UKIP, the British Eurosceptic party, is a case in point.  Supposedly UKIP is a party of the right.  The error is one of trying to pound every political movement into the left/right paradigm.  The real divide is between freedom and tyranny.  Both communism and fascism are tyrannies and both are socialist.  Ludwig von Mises explained that there were two models of socialism--the Russian model, exemplified by the Soviet Union, and the German model, exemplified by Nazi Germany.  ("Nazi" itself translates as "national socialism".)  In the book that was partly responsible for winning him the Nobel Prize in Economics, The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek said that communism and fascism were two sides of the same socialist coin.  UKIP, by contrast, is a party of freedom.  It may be conservative in the sense that it wants to conserve (and regain) ancient British liberties and, to fulfill that end, Britain needs to leave the EU.  One needs merely to follow the daily insane edicts streaming from Brussels to realize that it is not a source or protector of anyone's liberties.

1 comment:

  1. Pat,
    In discussions about Obama's politics when he was running the first time I made a similar analogy. I was chastised others claiming that Nazism had no foundation or comparison with socialism or Marxism. Thank you for this posting.

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