Nazism (2014)

"Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism" (February 25, 2014), The Telegraph

• On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars.
• Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.
• Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers' Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.
• Marx's error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity - to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order.
• What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.
• The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture.
• Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the "racial trash" - the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism.
• Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.

Russian aggression (2018)

"Dan Hannnan: Russian aggression keeps happening because it keeps working" (13 August 2018), The Washington Examiner

• Here is Russia, blatantly threatening a neighboring state with war if it seeks to pursue an independent foreign policy, yet we are so habituated to Russian flouting of international law that we barely notice any more.

• Georgia, like Ukraine and Moldova, is a sovereign state. If we accept, in practice, that Russia can alter borders by force, we signal to Moscow that it can violate international norms with impunity. We can hardly then complain if the Kremlin meddles in American elections, or orders murders on British soil.

• We threaten to rain fire upon North Korea and Iran, yet we quail before an elderly, impoverished and decrepit Russia. How diminished we are as a civilization.

Identity politics (2018)

"Daniel Hannan: Identity politics. It becomes impossible to avoid giving offence, because the offended keep changing the rules." (22 August 2018), Conservative Home

• If people are determined to be outraged, they will be outraged.

• In an atmosphere when anyone can close down the conversation by saying “I feel uncomfortable”, rational discussion becomes impossible. The empirical method, the basis of Enlightenment civilization, no longer applies.

• Race is said to be non-existent, yet our cultural elites rarely seem to think of anything else.

• Surely the liberal ideal one is where, instead of obsessing about the ethnic backgrounds of actors, we treat their skin-colour as just one more attribute, like hair-colour or the ability to speak the appropriate accent for the production.