Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Who is secure in all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything? The answer might be nuns and monks, but the standard reply is 'prisoners'.”
“The farmer was and remains the stumbling block to socialist experiments everywhere. Since he raises his own food and tends to live in his own house, he is less “controllable” than say, the urban dweller.”
“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”
“The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, "ultramodern." Old truths can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found. The Man of the Right does not have a time-bound, but a sovereign mind.”
“The shock which the Nazi horrors produced was so great, because they came after two hundred years of Roussellian propaganda about the goodness of human nature and also because the Germans were literate, clean, technologically progressive, hard working, “modern,” sober, “orderly,” and so forth. Yet about human nature we get more concrete and more pertinent information from the Bible than from statistics dealing with secondary education, the frequency of bathtubs or the mileage of superhighways.”
“Generals, on the average, are far less bellicose than journalists or patriotic housewives: They know the horrors of a war and they dislike any break in the routine”
“There was no more reasonable sequitur between “provocation” and “reaction” in the case of the French Revolution than in the case of the Jews and the Nazis, the Armenians and the young Turks, the old Russian regime, the Kerensky interlude and bolshevism, Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and the horrors perpetrated by savage monsters of Holden Roberto’s “Liberation Front,” the Belgian administration in the Congo and the delirious atrocities of Gbenye and Mulele, British colonialism in Kenya and the Mau-Mau. We have to face the fact that man is not “good”—only the extraordinary man is, only the heroic saint or the saintly hero, while the noble savage belongs to the world of fairy tales.”
“The world, however, is indebted to Germany in a terrifying way, because she demonstrated to everyone what the ultimate conclusions of negative and destructive ideas really are. Ideas which in London or New York are repeated as seemingly harmless abstractions have been shown up by the Germans in all their blood-chilling finality. In this sense Nazi Germany has become the Gorgonian Mirror in which a decadent West could study its own features.”
“Democracy is a political form, a system of government. It has no social content, although it is frequently misused in that sense. It is wrong to say, “Mr. Green is very democratic; on his trips he sits down for lunch with his chauffeur.” He is, rather, a friend of simple people, and so is appropriately called demophile, not democratic. “Democracy” is a Greek word composed of demos (the people) and krátos (power in a strong, almost brutal sense). The milder form would be arché which implies leadership rather than rule. Hence “monarchy” is the fatherlike rule of a man in the interest of the common good, whereas “monocracy” is a one-man tyranny.”
“Still, in summing up the situation, we must not forget that the New Left expresses certain truths and truisms and provides us with not a few straws in the wind. However immature, destructive, sterile, and confused, it is a cry of anguish and protest against a mechanized, profoundly leftish age. It is, in a sense, leftism to end all leftism.”
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Book Keywords:
world-war-ii, justice, democracy-gone-wrong, theology, journalists, nazis, monarchy, statistics, warfaring, monocracy, political, war, human-nature, rightism, politics-patriotism, bellicose, demophile, political-left, journalism, new-left, ideology, progress, liberals, leftism, monarchism, conservativism, germany, traditionalism, original-sin, bible, warmongering, political-right, french-revolution, world-war-i, tradition, military-generals, atrocities, democide, democracy, german-history, military
