Taking Richard Spencer’s commentary to task

Regarding the Spencer “Spencer Commentary”:

Liberal reforms in governments over the past several hundred years have all provided improvements in the lots of marginalized populations, specifically beginning in the 1600s, even leading to the very foundation of the United States. More recently in America, there were massive liberal changes after the Great Depression (think Social Security). Conservatives, by definition, have always fought these changes, favoring, for example, monarchies, aristocracies, dictatorships and tyrannies, etc.

The article is inclusive of base pejoratives against those who disagree with his viewpoint, apparently in an effort to posit himself well within the “us” versus “them,” which is the current political effort to turn the federal government into an arm for right-wing causes that include ethnic hatred, racism and disparagement as tools to obtain authoritarian powers over the gullible parts of our population.

Labeling liberals as “loonies” has no place in an article that pretends to be informative and convincing.

His reference to Francois Noel Babeuf, a notable anti-monarchist during the French Revolution, is completely meaningless, first because very few people know who this person is, and secondly because he was a known agitator in Monarchist France who championed the millions and millions of suffering French men and women under the subjugation of their overlords, who lived in extreme luxury, favoring gold mirrors and faucets over economic justice. Kings and emperors have always been conservatives.
His reference to Hayek, a noted economist, is simply erroneously interpreted and out of context.

His reference to Hannah Arendt, who died in 1969, is totally off base as her concern with totalitarianism was aimed originally and specifically in the context of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet dictatorship (both Jew-haters who murdered their political enemies, stole private property, and banished human rights) which had nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with tyranny and authoritarian rule. Arendt was, in fact, a fan of socialism, though that was not her focus. She would be appalled to see a reference to her included in this rant.

The current politics of hatred are more akin to what occurred in Germany leading up to the takeover of that nation by Adolf Hitler, who ruled in part by creating minorities such as Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals on whom he could dump his bile while striving for “Deutschland über alles” support from the radical-right while deluding and intimidating the majority of Germans. In a short period of 20 years, this tyrant, with his Japanese allies, caused the death of up to 80 million people, six to eight million of them Germans, and a half million Americans. That was totalitarianism at its worst.

That was no more socialism than Stalin’s tyrannical and bloodthirsty rule represented communism, a flawed system that has never been successful. Socialism, however, is practiced to some degree in many advanced nations, particularly in Europe, with no evil results and many positive results. Socialism does not include ownership by the government of private property (fascism and communism) nor rule by the select over ordinary citizens, the hallmark of Nazism and Stalinism, which own the citizenry.

Socialism does include protections for the average citizen in the helter-skelter of capitalism, thus making sure that you and I do not return to a state of political-financial slavery.

David Dagenais, MSW, of Milton is a retired social worker and therapist.