Let’s be honest, the ACLU has never defended all freedoms for all people; For example, it rarely, if ever, defends the Second or Tenth Amendments

If the American Civil Liberties Union was ever a champion of its supposed namesake — civil liberties — it no longer is. 

Thus writes Benny Huang.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the ACLU has quietly drafted new guidelines that address which legal battles it will wade into. Civil liberties are now being balanced with other considerations.

In an eight-page memo, the ACLU agonized over whether and when to lend a helping hand to people it clearly despises. It did not categorically reject the possibility that the organization would defend deplorables’ civil liberties, but it left itself plenty of weaselly escape hatches.

It’s complicated, you see. Really, really complicated.

I suspect that the ACLU has always quietly exercised discretion when choosing its cases even if it didn’t say so publicly. To be sure, even these guidelines were for ACLU eyes only, a clear indication that the organization still wants to be perceived as stalwart defenders of the Bill of Rights.

Maintaining the organization’s public image is paramount. As former ACLU president Nadine Strossen said in a recent interview, “The ACLU defends all fundamental freedoms for all people.”

But it doesn’t and, let’s be honest, it never has. For example, the ACLU has never filed a Second Amendment lawsuit. Their Bill of Rights apparently includes only nine amendments. Or is it eight? Despite the federal government’s extreme overreach, the ACLU rarely sues the federal government for violating the tenth amendment. The ACLU does however fight valiantly for “a woman’s right to choose” (to kill her unborn baby) even though that one doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution. Clearly there’s an agenda here beyond motherhood and apple pie.

The ACLU is now admitting that there are lots of factors that need to be considered before taking a case. The first question that needs to be asked is whose rights are being trampled? Is it good people or bad people? Its own side or the other side? Supposed oppressors or the supposed oppressed?

 … While the memo stresses that the ACLU might still decide to take on such cases, it isn’t automatic.
 

And so the great climbdown begins. The ACLU, that great defender of free speech even when it’s inconvenient, is now affixing caveats.

But at least it’s finally admitting what I have been saying for a long time, namely that there’s a conflict between fundamental constitutional principles — free speech, free exercise of religion, a free press — and what they like to call “justice,” which is nothing more than code for their political agenda.

And make no mistake about it, their agenda creates a lot of “tension” — a word that appears eight times in memo — with Madisonian rights. The ACLU will now approach this tension gingerly, hoping that no one notices that it’s deserted its core mission of defending the Bill of Rights. People will just have to understand that its members failed to defend our supposedly inalienable rights only after serious deliberation that made plenty of allowances for, as they call it, “nuanced and intentional consideration of the competing interests.”

At the core of these guidelines is the tacit admission that the ACLU’s “values” are in fact antithetical to the Constitution. On this we can agree. Clearly the ACLU has arrived at a time for choosing even if it doesn’t want to admit it.

Throughout our history there have always been constitutional violations and in every case they were defended by people who believed they had other, more important interests to uphold, such as the protection of public morals, the dignity of the family unit, or wartime necessity, to name a few.

This last justification for ignoring the Constitution is what eventually gave birth in 1917 to the National Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), forerunner to the ACLU. It was a tumultuous time, with the United States committing itself to war in Europe over the stringent opposition of socialists, communists, and anarchists. Citing the need to mobilize the country for “the war to end all wars,” the U.S. government cracked down on dissent. The CLB argued (correctly) that there was no wartime exception to the civil liberties safeguarded in the Constitution.

[The ACLU memo] is obviously a veiled reference to the recent Masterpiece Cake Shop decision, which was, at the time this document was written, on its way to the Supreme Court. The memo is clearly implying that Colorado really was violating two of the First Amendment’s clauses — free speech and free exercise of religion — but the ACLU just doesn’t care. “Equality” was more important.

In any other context I have no doubt that the ACLU, with its expansive view of speech, would have come to the aid of an artisan compelled to use his talents to create a message of which he disapproves. But not when it’s a Christian baker who doesn’t want to custom-design a cake for homosexual nuptials. “Gays” good, Christians bad.

It would have been bad enough if the ACLU had refused to take on the Christian baker’s case because of other, competing, anti-constitutional values. But it went further than that. It litigated the case from the other side. Not content to stand on the sidelines while Jack Phillips’s constitutional rights were being savaged, the ACLU decided to jump in and get some blood on its own knuckles.

Not that it would ever admit this openly. In court the ACLU attorneys argued that Jack Phillips’s rights were not being violated, which is a more compelling argument than “Yeah, but so what?”

 … The ACLU is suffering from a bad case of cognitive dissonance, trying to navigate a course between what it thinks it stands for and what it actually stands for. It can have the Constitution or it can have its agenda, but it can’t have both.

The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A World of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

The more you think about it, the more you realize how brilliant it was for Donald Trump to state in his first State of the Union address that "Americans are dreamers, too."

In that short phrase, indeed, the president took on what is the entire worldview of the left in a nutshell.

The world perspective of the Democrats in the Donkey party and their allies in the Democracy-Dies-in-Darkness media can be called the Dichotomy of the D's. (Thanks for the link, Maggie.)

The "basket of deplorables" is not just a Hillary Clinton expression for those "offensive, hateful, mean-spirited" Republicans who are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it." 

A Deplorable turns out to be the description of every "normal" bourgeois Westerner (first and foremost Americans).

Dreamers, by contrast, are not just the nickname given to young illegal immigrants who, according to DACA, ought to be allowed to remain in the United States. Anybody and everybody who is opposed to the above-mentioned caste of untouchables turns out to be some type of a Dreamer.

• Related: The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph

From illegal aliens to foreign leftist dictators, the population of the planet turns out to be formed almost exclusively of admirable and deserving dreamers, all the forward-looking prophets in America and just about all the foreigners in the world.

With one glaring exception: all red-blooded Americans and every one of their allies abroad.

(Update: Almost four months after posting the present post, a Peter Hasson article on a Tom Steyer ad comparing Donald Trump to Saddam Hussein appeared in the Daily Caller with a photo of the billionaire wearing a T-shirt saying exactly what this post says about the ubiquity of dreamers. Update 2: By 2020, the British edition of Evan Osnos's Joe Biden biography was American Dreamer.)

Think about it:

Isn't it true that, basically, you can take any position of the left these days — the people who could best be described as drama queens — and apply the D Dichotomy to it: it all turns out to be about the Deserving Dreamers versus the Despicable Deplorables

• Right-wing Conservative journalists, undercover reporters, and/or other conservative activists are called "despicable" by such people as the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, who goes on to say that a real journalist "has to have in his or her heart a desire to make society better" — in other words, the real MSM operative has to be some sort of a dreamer.

Thus it is hardly surprising to find a Times op-ed saying that the ignorant do not have the right to an audience. (The author turns out to be Bryan W Van Norden, “a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University” and therefore, according to Robert Shibley, an employee of the Chinese Communist government. But hey! Don't communists turn out to be dreamers, too?! Fear not, we will get back to the subject…)

• Ted Cruz, during the 2016 debates, echoing Newt Gingrich during those of 2012, summarized the mainstream media's outlook well: explain to us why you Republicans are such cartoon caricatures, while for the Democrats, the questions were: Tell us about your sublime plans (your glorious dreams) to bring our nation, our planet, towards a bright shining future.

Where conservatives are involved, it is, it must be, about the personal, because these deplorable beings are driven by greed or by politics and have nothing but nefarious schemes. They may say the same exact thing as a liberal and have a similar policy to that of a Democrat, but should that happen, it can only be attributed to politicizing and other types of hypocrisy.

Leftists, by contrast, are always, and only, driven by the highest of principles, by their dreams.

Turn back to Barack Obama's Hope 'n' Change. As Ann Althouse points out, this is the dream of destitute people in need. (But conservatives are not against people in need per se; they are for people being, or bringing themselves, "outside" of need — preferably, if and when possible, through their own efforts.)

Think of the adulation (past and/or present) afforded to such people as Che Guevara, Hugo Chávez, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Marx, as well as, last but not least, the author of Dreams From My Father and Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, the president who dreamed (and dreams) of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America", i.e., the land of the haters, the (fill-in-the-blank)phobes, and… the deplorables.

Homosexuals, women, blacks, transgenders, illegal aliens, even children and… the mentally ill (!): every minority is composed of victimized, and martyred, dreamers yearning, and deserving, to break free, to tell their story, to give their special brand of wisdom, while every member of the majority, every Christian, every member of the white race (unless they turn good and side with the dreaming leftists or at least pipe down) is an oppressor, a bad person, a despicable deplorable.

(Why do so many American, and Western, citizens, go along with this? Because they get to take pride in being part of the small, élite band of good guys, the club of the virtuous, those wise beings who see how terrible their neighbors in the general population are…)

Here are some more illustrations:

• Why were fans of Jimmy Fallon upset that Donald Trump appeared on his show during the 2016 campaign? Because a dreamer, or someone admired by dreamers, managed (almost?) to make a human being out of a deplorable, i.e., a monster.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel's tears on ABC are clearly the antics of a dreamer upset with the decisions of the deplorables who no longer want to follow the aspirations of his class.

• Stormy Daniels may be a porn star while Sarah Huckabee is a government spokesperson, but Stormy is a dreamer, or on the side of the dreamers (or certainly not actively against the dreamers), while Sarah is one of the deplorables. (Indeed, even adult actors are not in the same class as deplorables, as can be evidenced on Twitter, which likes nothing better to censor the tweets of conservatives such as Stacy McCain, Milo Yiannopoulos, Kevin Williamson, Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, Sheriff Clarke, Mark Dice, and Breitbart, but for which the XXX-rated photos and the hard-core videos of professional porn stars (NSFW) are entirely permissible.)

• As for any leftists, in Hollywood or elsewhere, bold enough to suggest that any of these monsters might be something as innocuous as… "a genuine person" — or that we shouldn't criticize a fellow leftist for being willing to [cross] the aisle and being open to making precisely such a comment — woe upon those heretics and upon their careers.

• Why is Roseanne punished for a personal tweet while Samantha Bee, Kathy Griffin, and Michelle Wolf get little to no blowback for their expletive-sanctioned shows?

Well, because conservative comics have no excuse for being the despicable deplorables they are, while liberal comics have the excuse that y'know, deep down, they are… deserving dreamers, Hollywood dreamers who to boot manage to correctly identify and mercilessly mock the wicked enemy.

• This is why Hollywood lies about its blatant liberal bias: The artists are the dreamers forced to hide, at least partially, their agendas, i.e., their dreams, because the content thereof is (sigh! how unfortunate!) something the clueless deplorables would never be able to understand. (Needless to say, this is what, in the Ghostbusters reboot or in the Star Wars universe, causes Hollywood (creators and journalists alike), to blame the the fans for not being woke enough.)

• As for the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC's hate groups map is basically a message that anybody who is not a liberal like is a despicable monster belonging to a vicious hate group.
• Also, when leftists find excuses for the criminal class while blaming society, what they are basically doing is calling the criminals a type of dreamers whose pipe dreams where shattered by the deplorables of the "normal" bourgeoisie and by the disgraceful society that they or their forefathers created.

• Because deplorables are clueless clods, because Americans are terrible citizens, because “arch-conservatives” are “kooks,” “crackpots,” and “crazies”, it is okay — even necessary and recommended and, yes, encouraged, not to mention, as it happens, rib-tickling — to pull the wool over their eyes. (See the Obamacare promise and Obama's Iran deal…)

Of course, when leftists deplore the stupidity of the American voter or call Americans ignorant hillbillies or opine that Americans are Either Really Stupid or Incredibly Bigoted… Really, Really Dumb People, they are not really making a dispassionate comment on the IQ of the average American, a topic that is open for debate and discussion. Members of the tribe of the virtuous are outraged that the deplorables do not share, or do not support, the dreams of the leftist dreamer class.

Why, by the way, do so many "independent" journalists turn out to be Democratic operatives with bylines? Because, almost of necessity, by the very nature of their work, they must start out as, or become, drama queens — always in search of a crisis, real or otherwise.

Try taking Jim Treacher's ever-green definition of modern journalism and substitute a few choice ex pressions for "Democrats":

Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they might reflect badly on the Dreamers and on the drama queens and on the crisis finders/crisis creators.

Now try doing the same with Iowahawk's journalism definition:

Journalism is about covering important stories detrimental to Dreamers and to drama queens and to the crisis finders/crisis creators. With a pillow, until they (the important stories) stop moving.

Speaking of which, an institution created (no matter how many decades or centuries ago), and run, by deplorables is an abomination; headed by dreamers, it is deserving of nothing but the utmost respect…

Head over to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, and see if the deplorable/dreamer dichotomy doesn't make sense in the following sentence:

That is how the liberal Gleichschaltung works; contrary [i.e., deplorable] voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not. Progressive [i.e., dreamer] voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified — in the name of "diversity," or "liberation," or "unity," and, most of all, "progress."

First Amendment rights must be curbed because it enhances the deplorables' free speech to the detriment of the aspirations of the dreamers. As Ben Shapiro writes,

Free speech is just another element of a corrupt republic that must be torn down brick by brick in favor of a better world. When you see Donald Trump as the final iteration of a hierarchical system built to prevent the world from achieving utopia, that system must be dismantled — starting with the freedoms that allowed Donald Trump to become president. It’s that simple for the Left.

With several examples of how dangerous and insane liberals have become, Matt Tapscott asks, along with Craig Shirley and Scott Mauer, why liberals are always so violent.

Easy. Because they are drama queens. Drama queens who split the world into two — Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables.

This is why leftists, aka dreamers, cannot maintain peaceful and reasonable discourse, and why protests turn vicious, dangerous, and personal.

Men, inches from her face, screaming at [Florida attorney general Pam Bondi] and blocking her path

In their immigration furor, the spitting mad dreamers can barely tolerate moderate Republicans.

All of these haters must be as bad as fascists. All of them must be as bad as Saddam Hussein, as bad as Adolf Hitler.

Because deplorables are such horrid people — can those monsters even be termed human beings?! — they must, in one way or another, be made to shut up.

It is always okay to believe the worst of these "untouchables" and to go about punishing them in any which way possible, from Facebook bans and doxxing to licking their doorknobs and spitting in their food. Not to mention (cough) incivility, blacklisting, and assassination, along with family strife, mainly dreamer parents not letting deplorable grandparents see their grand kids.

• Related: The Divine Right of Democrats: Kevin Williamson on the liberation of the Donkey party by the practical elimination of the Republican party (America is  "suffering from a kind of infection in the form of the Republican party, which inhibits the normal and healthy — meaning Democrat-dominated — political life of the United States")

You get the picture.

This article has lasted long enough.

Let's end it with a view on foreign affairs…

Why did the media ignore Barack Obama's faux pas and half-truths, fawning over his every move, while lashing out at every Trump White House?

As we have seen, because Obama was, and is, an admirable dreamer while Trump is, and was, a despicable deplorable.

What gave secretary of state Hillary Clinton the right to aim for a reset button with Moscow and Barack Obama license to whisper to the Russian president that he would be more flexible after the coming election?

Wouldn't you know it? The deplorables' foes are in fact no foes at all, only dreamers in their own right, and it is only the puerile bigotry of the despicable deplorables that makes them foes in the first place.

The Russians are (somehow) dreamers — that is, unless and until they are said to allegedly side with a Republican (of which, more 8 or 9 sentences down). In the Obama White House, as in the Carter administration, the Iranian ayatollahs are/were dreamers as well.

Go back further to the mid-1970s. Jimmy Carter tries to convince Americans to be more understanding and accepting of communism, while using human rights sanctions on such allies as the Shah of Iran. Why?

America's allies, being allies of the despicable deplorables, become despicable deplorables themselves — they run the gamut from Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Chile's General Pinochet to Miami's Cubans and the Florida family members of Elián Gonzales — while the foes of the despicable deplorables (American or foreign) turn out to be no more than misunderstood dreamers.

In this respect, the basic message of the 1960s peace movement and all its Hanoi Janes amounts to  America's deplorables trying to prevent dreamers in North Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh's Viet Kong allies (all of whom were even called the equivalents of America's founding fathers) from realizing their aspirations.

Meanwhile, Americans are bitter and frustrated deplorables clinging "to guns and religion" who have no understanding of foreigners' aspirations and dreams.

All foreigners, all Europeans, in this grass-is-greener simplification, are dreamers — setting up roadblocks to hate speech, implementing gun control, guaranteeing universal healthcare…

To quote Tucker Carlson's recap of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interview, "people who show up here and ignore our laws are more American than you are."

Why, in the 1980s, would Ted Kennedy secretly contact Moscow to get the Soviets' help in defeating Ronald Reagan in the presidential election?

Because the leader of the Kremlin was, somehow, a dreamer in his own right while the Gipper was a war-mad deplorable.

Incidentally, as we have seen, Vladimir Putin was a dreamer with whom the deplorables could do business, if only they knew how to expand their vision and, like Barack Obama and the Clintons, be tolerant of and open to his personal dreams.

That is, until the Russian president was accused of having helped a despicable deplorable win the 2016 election, in which case the ally of such a monster instantly became a despicable deplorable himself.

What is it that, for a century now, has given the communists an excuse for the millions upon millions upon millions of citizens they butchered?

You know the line:

"They had good intentions." What does this mean?

They had constructive dreams. Yes, the communists, they were/are dreamers.

Joseph McCarthy was among the ultimate deplorables deserving of nothing but contempt and condemnation. Why so much paranoia about communists who were basically harmless?! Well, okay okay; sure there was that minor matter that they killed millions and millions and millions of Russians, and millions and millions and millions of Chinese, and millions and millions and millions of Cambodians, etc, etc, etc, but (!) c'mon — remember the communists were (or are) dreamers, and they had (or have) good intentions (good dreams)…

Related: The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph

Update: Andrew Klavan on PJ Media:

Every television show you watch, every movie, every woman's magazine, every comedian, and, yes, every news program tells you you suck. Your country sucks. Your culture sucks. Your religion and your morals suck. And you personally are one of those dumb-ass racists who clings to his Bible and talks funny.

If you believe your country should vet its immigrants, you're racist. If you voted for Donald Trump, you're racist. If you make a joke about Barack Obama on Facebook, you're racist twice. If you think motherhood is a woman's highest calling, you're sexist. If you take it ill when Islamists blow you up in the name of their nasty little god, you're Islamophobic. If you know that a man is a man even if he says he's a woman, you're transphobic. If you think it's fair to debate whether homosexual actions are moral or not, you're homophobic.

Every day. From every outlet. All the time.

How can Nazis be called Right Wing when they denied individual liberty, responsibility, and property rights?

 … the words ‘never again’ are little more than a hollow slogan 

deplores Ed Kozak.

For if we refuse to accept, and more importantly challenge, the ideological origins of a movement that culminated in the systematic murder of millions of innocent human beings, there is absolutely no way we can prevent the same from happening again.

The easiest way of proving that the origins of Nazism are in no way remotely conservative is to start by looking at some defining features of conservatism itself, specifically the European variety.

These include: the belief that a society rooted in monarchy and aristocracy is preferable to mass democracy; that there is a transcendental moral order (what Kirk called the Permanent Things) which in Western Civilization has been preserved and passed down through the Christian Church; that property rights are the very foundation of ordered liberty; and, of course, the universal conservative belief that any necessary societal change must occur slowly and without structural damage to ancient and proven institutions – that problems in society come not from broken traditions and institutions but from broken men and morals.

It should go without saying that Nazism had no love of monarchy or aristocracy. Hitler didn’t reinstate the House of Hohenzollern; he made himself dictator. The notion that the son of a minor civil servant (Alois Hitler himself born a bastard and of peasant stock) had a right to rule over Germany can hardly be called traditionally conservative. Moreover, his great dislike of the aristocratic military establishment is well known; the lack of a ‘von’ in front of his surname was a permanent chip on Hitler’s shoulder. Granted, Himmler liked to play feudal lord with the SS, but his was a ‘feudalism’ based on a half-cocked interpretation of a quasi-mythical pagan past.

This brings us nicely to defining conservative feature number two: Christianity. Himmler’s obsession with paganism is very well-documented. Hitler may have viewed the SS as his personal bodyguard, but Himmler viewed them as a pagan Knights Templar, destined to recreate a utopic, pre-Christian Teutonic society.

Furthermore, the ‘official’ religion of Nazism was positive Christianity, a doctrine that can hardly be called positive or Christian. This ‘Christian’ ideology rejected the Jewish bible in its entirety, rejected Jesus’ Jewish origins, and wished to wipe Catholicism off the face of the earth (stalwart defender of tradition it is) and create a united Nazi protestant church.

Nor can it be said that the Nazis had any respect for traditional property rights. They nationalized industries, advocated progressive taxation schemes, and were virulently anti-capitalist. Now, that’s not to say that conservatism must necessarily be in favour of pure, unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism (see Kirk, Chesterton, etc.), but whereas the traditionalist objection to capitalism is at its heart an objection to the disastrous spiritual and moral effects of industrialisation, the Nazis’ objection to capitalism was rooted firmly in post-industrialist, Marxist interpretations of economics.

The conservative argues that socialism isn’t a cure for the disease of industrial society, but a symptom of the same sickness. As we all know, Nazi property violations weren’t limited solely to estate, they also infringed upon life and liberty with spectacular zeal, especially the life and liberty of those they deemed sub-human.

‘Aha’, says the skeptical reader, ‘this is where I have him! This crazy conservative doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He just wrote it himself, the Nazis were a bunch of racists, surely that means they were right wing!’ Now, unlike you, my dear liberal reader, I understand that man is fallen, so I’ll forgive you your ignorance on the matter. First, let’s briefly get this ‘right wing’ thing out of the way, shall we?

Yes, fascists and Nazis were almost from the start called ‘right wing’, but this was a slander employed by other socialists, meant to discredit these socialists of a distinctly nationalist bent in the eyes of fellow radical travelers. If they were ‘right wing’ at all they were the ‘right wing’ of the left.

As Jonah Goldberg explains in his brilliant (and apparently woefully under-read) Liberal Fascism, this is why street fighting between fascists and communists was so vicious in Germany; these people were fighting for the same hearts and minds, the same segment of middle class voters susceptible to revolutionary nonsense. The godfather of fascism himself, Mussolini, was a member of [the Internationale], and the term ‘national socialist’ was in use in leftist circles well before the Nazi party was created.

Now, let me be as clear as possible on this subject: ethnic nationalism, let alone racism, is in no way conservative. The scientific racism of the Nazis, so popular across Europe from the beginning of the twentieth century until the devastating and inevitable result of its assertions, would never have developed if not for nationalist movements.

Nationalism as we know it was one of the earliest leftist ideologies, and remains fundamentally left wing, going hand in hand with identity politics. It was forged, as almost all ideological poisons that plague us today, in the fires of the French Revolution, and developed as a means of undermining the old European order, specifically the grand and, more importantly, multi-ethnic empires of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and, to an extent, Britain.

The idea that countries should be based on single ethnic groups – the promotion of nation states – is an ideologically radical position. To a conservative, culture, not race, is what matters. The cry of the National Socialist is blood and soil, race and nation. The cry of the conservative is king and country.

Thus do the intellectually honest arrive at the inescapable conclusion: Nazism is not conservative. And if it is not conservative, it cannot be truly called right wing. It is a product of the French Revolution, just another bastard child of Rousseau’s love affair with himself, simply one more in a long line of deformed, monstrous political creatures to slither its way out of the primordial Jacobin soup.

The fact that Central and Eastern Europe (really all of Europe for that matter) have a long and at times vicious history with anti-Semitism is well known, and frequently referenced when discussing collusion with Nazis in occupied countries.

What is noted with far less frequency, and is far more important, however, is that fact that not until the dissolution of the Christian monarchies and the introduction of mass democracy was there an organised, systematic attempt to wipe out European Jewry (if you think the Holocaust is in any way comparable to the Inquisition in premise or scope, you comprehend neither). In fact, between the time the Christianization of Europe was completed and the French Revolution, there were really no organised, systematic attempts to wipe out anyone in Europe.

This is the obvious truth we ignore when we censure and censor people who would accurately link Nazism with leftism. Political theorist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn articulated this truth brilliantly:

The fatal year is 1789, and the symbol of iniquity is the Jacobin Cap. Its heresy is the denial of personality and of personal liberty. Its concrete realizations are Jacobin mass democracy, all forms of national collectivism and statism, Marxism producing socialism and communism, fascism, and national socialism, leftism in all its modern guises and manifestations to which in America the good term 'liberalism,' perversely enough, is being applied. The issue is between man created in the image of God and the termite in a human guise.

Only a German people ripped from tradition, a German people starved of Judeo-Christian morality, drugged with the false promise of a better future, and subjected to the authority of those who have no right to it, could stand by and watch, at times cheer even, as millions of human beings – precious, living, breathing human beings – were systematically herded up like cattle and sent to be exterminated like termites.

Make no mistake. There is little difference, if any, in principle between fascism, communism, and progressivism – between Soviets, Nazis, and today’s UK Labour Party or US Democratic Party. The difference lies only in the degree to which those ideological principles are followed through.

All promise a utopian future, to be attained by sacrificing tradition at the altar of progress. All deny class distinctions as well as the old order, politically rooted in Feudalism, morally rooted in Christianity. They deny individual liberty, responsibility, and property rights. And most importantly, perhaps not to be counted among the ideological tenants listed above, but as a result of them, they inevitably end up denying the sanctity and value of human life.

In Nazi-occupied Poland, an elderly Jewish rabbi becomes nothing more than a germ, merely to be cleansed. In Soviet-occupied Lithuania, a respectable businessman becomes an enemy of the people, merely to become part of a statistic.

Students across the globe rhetorically ask how people could participate in something as evil as the Holocaust. The answer is simple: It is the easiest thing in the world to commit evil when one doesn’t believe it to be such, when one exists in a society governed by moral relativism. The choice is indeed between man created in the image of God and the termite in a human guise. Those who would obfuscate the ideological and philosophical origins of Nazism have made their choice known.