L.K. Samuels > Quotes

“Government succeeds by failing.”
― L.K. Samuels

“By the late 20th century, the general consensus among most historians attributed the origins of fascism to one of the numerous branches of heretical Marxism that had developed into dictatorship, nationalization, welfarism, and militarism. Later, Sternhell, in The Birth of Fascist Ideology, he took the position that the ‘origins’ of Franco-Italian fascism ideology was ‘Marxism,’ or to be more precise, from ‘a very specific revision of Marxism.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“After his arrest and internment in Munich, Hitler turned away from communism and ‘espoused the cause of Social Democracy against that of the Communists.’ He had to disown communism. If he hadn’t he would have likely been executed, imprisoned or banished from Germany.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“After the bourgeoisie, middle class, and merchants instigated the French Revolution and sat on the left side of the aisle in opposition to the authoritarians, their legacy was ignored. The Socialist and nationalist intelligentsia sought to consciously bury the memory of original left-wing middle-class history and sitting arrangements. They mercilessly co-opted the left-wing label from the bourgeoisie revolutionary ‘Free Left,’ and denounced anyone who opposed their social revolution as reactionary or right-wing. These usurpers not only stole the left-wing designation from the bourgeoisie insurgents, but also absconded with their revolutionary ancestry. English historian William Doyle acknowledged this historical thievery, writing that after the French Revolution, the socialists were able to ‘appropriate the left-wing label and… lay exclusive claim to the revolutionary heritage.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“If people don’t have free agency, they become mere chattel to the herdsman who wields the biggest horsewhip.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“To accomplish this herculean feat, governmental bodies captured the legal power to intrude on human affairs in the hope of fixing man’s flawed nature, as though mankind were destined to live on a sterilized Planet Clorox, a land where everything could be made not only perfectly clean but free of risks. Governmental power was bulked up to launch a toxic blend of utopian and draconian measures to outlaw poverty, inequality, and injustice—supposedly. This socioeconomic jihad against liberty emerged after adherents of state-enhanced liberalism revised their ideological arsenal to include ‘positive rights.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Positive rights require physical force or intimidation in order to enforce these alleged ‘rights.’ In essence, they are faux rights that violate other people’s rights. Positive rights actually don’t exist; they are fictitious, a fraudulent tactic which subverts choice. Rights are not obligations. To physically force someone to give financial benefits to another makes a mockery of the principles of freedom of action, freedom of choice, and the right to be free from aggression. Rather, the license to institute compulsory practices leads to legalized and institutionalized aggression and robbery. Enabling political structures to plunder one in the name of others perverts the meaning of individual human rights.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“The statist Left’s first move was to alter the meaning of liberalism so as to keep the free Left and the public in a constant state of confusion. They diluted the original principles of liberalism while firing cheap polemical shots, arguing that John Locke’s liberalism had nothing to offer, that it contradicted itself. After all, if the statist Left could not win a fair fight on the philosophical battlefield, it had to resort to chicanery to gain an advantage. One way to accomplish this was to adulterate or falsify the liberal message to render it meaningless while advancing a new, redefined liberalism to replace the old. The deception was successful. The free-Left liberals and their allies had lost the semantic ammunition to defend liberty, and therefore became neutered, defanged, almost defenseless, deprived of the cognitive capability to defend the autonomy of the individual. As for the statist Left, they had to work diligently to ‘defascistize’ historical Fascism, because to do otherwise would force them to face an ugly image in the mirror.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“There were two French Revolutions—the first stage instigated by free-Left elements imbued with toleration, anti-authoritarianism, secularism, individualism, liberty and the revolutionary individualism of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. The second stage of the French Revolution devolved into a bloody, terroristic dictatorship, an all-powerful state amidst a cult of personality, such as the so-called incorruptible Maximilien Robespierre, in a counter-revolution that was anti-liberal and antithetical to the Lumières movement, which became the Age of Enlightenment.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“What this means is that liberalism had been poisoned by a false definition of liberty, one characterized by an unethical authoritarian demeanor, cast in rigid conformity to authority, obedience to rules, and slave-like submission to the collective, making individual subservient to the group. Instead of questioning authority or challenging state power, the apostles of illiberal positive rights idealize the State as a social panacea. To them, the state is everything, and almost nothing should be outside the state’s jurisdiction. This variant of creeping fascization infected Germany, Italy, and Russia in the first half of the 20th century.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“If socialist regimes work together, trade together, fight together, collaborate, and have fundamentally equivalent ideologies and tactics, they are genealogically related (a sort of Communist-Nazi brotherhood), which could be regarded as a Fascist-Marxist mindset. Of course, these socialist ideologues also fight each like rival siblings”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Yet it was the majority-led Girondins who had spearheaded the revolution and challenged the establishment. They accomplished far more than did the Montagnards. After toppling the king, the Girondins rushed into an abolitionist spree fueled by liberty, dissolving the last vestiges of aristocratic privilege, the system of church tithes, dues owed to local landlords, and personal servitude. The radical liberals also released the peasants from the seigneurial (lord) dues, which helped tenant farmers buy their own private farmland. Next, they turned their abolitionist gun-sights on the guild system that blocked entry to markets, as well as ‘tax farming,’ where private individuals would be licensed to collect taxes for the state while taking a large share for themselves.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“A number of die-hard Marxists have confirmed the mirroring of social totalitarian ideologies. Otto Rühle, a German Left communist and one of the founders of Second International, asserted that Bolshevism is a model for Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. In his 1939 article ‘The Struggle against Fascism Begins with the Struggle against Bolshevism,’ Rühle wrote that ‘Fascism is merely a copy of bolshevism,’ and that it was a ‘political and administrative terror system.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“The notion of miracles had a nice ring. But we were all alone… The natural laws of cruel reality were going to win out. Not only would the cavalry fail to save the day, but they also probably never got their marching orders. If goodness existed somewhere on the planet, it was probably on an extended sick leave.”
― L.K. Samuels

“Government in and of itself is the foremost agent for destroying order and imposing chaos."

"To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war."

"Political theory would be fine in a perfect world, but in an uncertain one, it is a dangerous gamble.”
― L.K. Samuels, In Defense of Chaos

“Under National Socialism, the state plundered and killed other national groups and races and use their resources to provide Germans with an unsparing welfare-warfare society. Under the alleged international socialism of Marxism, the state plundered and killed other classes to provide comrades with a welfare-warfare society. Both systems, the German’s and the Soviet’s, believed in equality and socialism, but for different collective groups. Although Nazism preached inequality between the races, it placed great significance on equality among true-blooded Germans ̈('Völkisch equality) and the spirit of fraternity.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Because of Hitler’s penchant for nationalistic Social Democracy and Marxian revolutionary violence, Nazism could be easily identified as a militant Social Democratic movement.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“After the invasion of Poland in 1939, Goebbels framed the war between capitalist England and socialist Germany with this observation: ‘England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people’s state.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“I had always subscribed to the cockroach theory: if you find one, there are bound to be far more. That meant that Dylan’s mission stank with a hoard of dirty-crawling secrets.”
― L.K. Samuels

“But after his victory over Scotland’s militia, I asked [Cromwell] whether England now blossomed with freedom. He hesitated. We both knew that he had arrested his opponents and censored his critics. I asked the question again. Finally, he said, ‘Aye, there be freedom in England. I may do whatever I wish.”
― L. K. Samuels, Ferret: The Reluctant King

“The truth will always be innately painful,… Like dry, crusty bread, it can be hard to swallow. But mankind has an affinity for evil. ’Tis a distemper that burrows deep under the skin like an abscess. We all wish to make slaves of others: one man over another, one clan over another, one kingdom over another. Never ending, never ceasing. A world of battle to conquer one’s fellow man before he conquers you.”
― L. K. Samuels, Ferret: The Reluctant King

“To harm another human releases your inner beast, allowing him to devour you in an orgy of hate. It will lead to a frenzy of butchery and bloodshed. And it will enslave your soul until a larger beast feasts on your corruptible flesh.”
― L. K. Samuels

“Hitler had allied with the Communist Party of Germany against the Social Democrats in support of a workers’ wage dispute. In that labor dispute, Hitler’s ‘brownshirts’ and red-flag-waving communists marched side by side through the streets of Berlin and damaged any buses whose drivers had failed to participate in the worker’s strike. Alongside the communists, Nazis ripped up tram lines, stood together, ‘shouted in unison,’ and ‘rattled their collecting tins’ to get donations for their strike funds in support of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO) for the communists and National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO) for the Nazis.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“That’s the horrible paradox. In essence, we were burning down our own houses to keep warm. Most intentions are noble, but when people started cranking up the wattage to impose order, we also generated a lethal voltage of disorder. Everything began to backfire. Like every great civilization of the past, we atrophy and finally cannibalize. We triggered our innate self-destruction mechanism that bore Frankenstein monsters."

--We Are Them: The War Years”
― L.K. Samuels

“Each of us must live within that reality. Forecasting is not an exact science—the future leaves no footprints. We cannot predict the future because we cannot precisely measure the present. Quantum mechanics proved that. We live in a probability-based world. We all know that the sun will rise in the morning. But even that’s just a high probability. Nothing is assured—nothing."

--We Are Them: The War Years (2022)”
― L.K. Samuels

“Despite the fact that three-fourths of Italy’s economic sector was owned by the government by the mid-1930s, most scholars routinely ignored Italian Fascism’s slide into pure Soviet-style socialism, a concentration of state ownership so large that it was only eclipsed by Stalin’s Soviet Union. The conventional definition of socialism is described as a social and economic system characterized by ‘public ownership’ of the ‘means of production.’ On the other hand, fascism is often explained as a social and economic system characterized by ‘public control’ over the ‘agents of production.’ But Mussolini’s regime eventually morphed into Fascist socialism as its means of production was placed under public ownership.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“Historically, Italian Fascism was founded as a Marxist-leaning party, which some have classified as a form of Fascist-Marxist ideology. From 1914 to at least 1921, Mussolini simultaneously proclaimed himself a Fascist while still adhering to Marxist doctrines and Marxist leaders such as Lenin. In 1914, Mussolini created the Marxist-sounding organization—the Fasci of Revolutionary Action (Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria, FAR). Mussolini’s first Fascist party—the Fascist Revolutionary Party (Partito Fascista Rivoluzionario, PFR)—was founded in 1915. Two years later, Mussolini still considered himself within the Marxist camp, praising the Bolshevik’s 1917 October Revolution, boasting of his camaraderie with Lenin and violent revolution. In the Italian elections of 1919, he publicly compared himself to Lenin, bragging that he was the ‘Lenin of Italy.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply… Why was I so defensive about our debased government? Why jump headlong into a meat grinder to defend those who would toss us on a flaming broiler without a second thought?”
― L.K. Samuels

“The belief that one cannot be fascist in any shape or form liberates the individual to behave as fascist as possible, granting him or her the illusion of anti-fascist sainthood—as has been witnessed with the wildly violent, Fascist-Marxist organizations like the ‘Antifa’ movement. These hateful gangs of revolutionary socialist and anarcho-statist militants are convinced that they are incapable of ever toting the baggage of fascism and therefore can freely be more violently fascist than the average fascist. Thinking they are free of fascist-socialist contamination, they can easily become what they oppose.”
― L.K. Samuels, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left'

“In the absence of truth, there is no penalty for failure. We seem destined to live in a failure-prone society.”
― L.K. Samuels