Is America On the Road to Serfdom? [Archive]

Anenome

10-31-2008, 07:29 PM

Here is the same version of "Road to Serfdom" that I put to music and made into a Flash presentation a few years back. If you want to email it to people this may be a good way to do it rather than the dry pages alone. It's also suitably short and thus works well in the medium.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/200989

"Road to Serfdom" is one of the great books that is important to read.

Truth is, Germany was the leading intellectual capitol of Europe for much of the 19th century. And its culmination was Fascism.

What is important to discover is how this came about. What was the intellectual climate in pre-fascism Germany?

The intellectual climate, as revealed by this book, was interesting. What was important to the intellectuals of Germany was to espouse and adopt the new idea first. Be the first guy on the block to adopt this new idea, or that new idea. They traded in ideas like fashion. So truth became unimportant. What was important was newness, freshness. This should be viewed as a dangerous clime. Ideas are not 'better' because they are 'new'. Often quite the opposite.

One of the great triumphs of the media, also exposed by this book, is the successful smearing of Nazi Germany and fascism as a Rightist idea. They used nationalism to smear us as Nazis. Nazis were in fact socialists, but they were national socialists. The word 'nazi' means 'national socialist' and comes from the German spelling for it "National Sozialist". This fact was conveniently swept under the rug, and to this day your average person does not know what the word 'Nazi' stands for, much less that they identified themselves as socialists.

In fact, "Road To Serfdom's" primary warning is that Fascism is the end product of all socialist societies. This can be born out in Russia, and current day China. China is, in fact, a Fascist country today, and has been for a very long time.