As Steven Hayward of Powerline points out, this speech by the British Prime Minister during WWII given while campaigning to retain that position after the war’s end, points out that a Socialist Government brooks no dissent. Yes, the title of this post is a wee bit over the top (after all, Churchill is no longer with us), but even though these words were spoken almost 70 years ago, the meaning still holds true – the Collective cannot tolerate thoughts contrary to its own.  After all, if people start thinking on their own, they have just gone “Individualistic” – the opposite of the most High Truth of Socialism: We ARE (and WILL BE) in this together.

My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Although it is now put forward in the main by people who have a good grounding in the Liberalism and Radicalism of the early part of this century, there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.

Look how even today they hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of wartime inflictions and monstrosities. There is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. The State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, and arch-administrator and ruler and the arch-caucus-boss. . .

A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and its aspects—and that is what I am speaking of—could not afford to suffer opposition. . . Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils. . . Have we not heard Mr Herbert Morrison descant upon his plans to curtail Parlimentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolution of broad principle in the House of Commons, afterward to be left by Parliament to the executive and to the bureaucrats to elaborate and enforce by departmental regulations? . . .

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