War criminals

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Facism - Two Cows Model:

You have two cows. The State takes both. You hail the Imperious Leader. One cow is pressed immediately into military service as an ox. You hail the Imperious Leader. The State hires you to take care of the other. You hail the Imperious Leader. You milk the cow and give the milk to the State, which sells it back to you. You hail the Imperious Leader. You give half of your milk to the two swine you have hidden in the attic, and they squeal excitedly. You sing victory songs about the Imperious Leader to drown out the squealing. You attend a rally to honor the 15th anniversary of the Imperious Leader's appendectomy. You hail the Imperious Leader. You come back and the swine are gone. The cow has a guilty look on her face. You hail the Imperious Leader. You wake up that night with a bright light in your eyes. They take you to a sausage factory where you are forced to watch the swine become breakfast. You hail the Imperious Leader. They take you back home. They give you another cow to milk. You hail the Imperious Leader.

Utopia can not be attained without the State exercising total control over every aspect of its citizens' lives.

"Liberalism is anything but liberal; it is about oppression, control, and strife under the false pretense of equality, fairness, and peace."

It sounds as if we're singing off the same page in the hymn book here. I think what I find most sobering is that liberals think they are morally justified when they do Orwellian things--which describes just about everything they do. One thing I will have to say about fascists is they didn't labor under any illusions--or delusions--as to what they were doing or what they were really about.

One final observation comparing fascism to liberalism and communism: Fascism directed its aggressions at foreign countries or those considered to be outsiders; liberalism and communism direct their aggression at their own citizens--the very people whose interests they are supposed to be protecting. Liberalism, like communism, has become the state versus its own citizens.

orwell was a "democratic socialist" and would have been much at home in most of today's western Europe.

the state of vermont claims to have an arrest warrant for bush.i dont know if that is true

you and I have very different definitions of liberal.

this is how I see the political spectrum:

communist, socialist, liberal, moderate, conservative, reactionary, fascist.

as far as libertarianism, one can be a conservative libertarian or a liberal libertarian. I tend to be a liberal libertarian.

orwell was more to the left than the average liberal.

as far as "no such thing as a non-authoritarian utopia" , anarchists would disagree. their utopia would be "no government".

perhaps if you explained your definition of liberal, liberalism would be something I wouldn't like, either.

Cathylynn, I am always happy to entertain an intelligent question. And since liberalism is one of the most misused words in our language, it is intelligent. Since what you ask for is enormously complex, I will provide you a schematic in roughly chronological form with summary definitions. First, I will start with the definition of conservatism, and then of the left:

A conservative is one who wishes to conserve a particular people and their culture, in a particular time and place.

The left is defined as those who want change from conservatism by way of some ideological program that is untested and untried. Liberalism, communism, and fascism are all of the left by this definition.

There are two types of liberalism, both of which are the socio-political expressions arising from the Enlightenment, and even more particularly from the scientific and industrial revolutions:

The first was right-liberalism, which is actually a hybrid of liberalism and conservatism termed "double consciousness" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The most outstanding characteristic of this system is capitalism. While right-liberalism undeniably has had many benefits, the drawbacks are such that it led to the development of communism and other radical movements in the mid 19C.

Communism, especially that formulated by Marx, was primarily characterized by advocating for the complete abolition of private property. While communism still lingers on today, it was largely discredited by the atrocities committed in its name, as well as the failure of its prognostications to be realized.

Fascism developed as a reaction to both communism and liberalism. Since there are good definitions already on this thread, I will leave it at that.

Because of communism's major problems, and the fact that it was culturally incompatible with our Anglo-Protestant cultural origins, left-liberalism, or what is often called the progressive movement, developed. This is what is called liberalism today in common parlance. Unlike right-liberalism, it is largely deracinated.

Because of its penchant for constant change, liberalism is hard to define, but does exhibit the following perennial characteristics in one degree or another: An emphasis on egalitarianism, universalism, individualism--and, of course, innovation.

This definition makes all of these movements sound innocuous, if not benign. The reason I so emphatically reject the left is its untested ideologies are tantamount to being dropped into a jungle to begin sampling all the plants not knowing what they are or what they will do; disaster is sure to result. In the case of the left, it has murdered over 120 million innocent people in peacetime in the 20C alone and inflicted untold misery on countless millions more.

Let's extend the plants in the jungle analogy just a little bit further. The reason we have the food we do today is because a lot of our predecessors died finding out what is poisonous and what is edible; it was trial and error, and a lot of people undoubtedly died in the process. By the same token, I'm a conservative because conservatism is about that which has a time-tested track record of working. Conservatism itself is the result of trial and error over many eons. Unlike the left, conservatism doesn't consist of ideas cooked up in the addled minds of intellectuals of dubious intent and ability.