A friend from Australia was reading my recent Statement of Conservatism and reminded me of this from Paul Johnson in The Spectator:
"One of the great errors of political taxonomy is to classify Hitler as right-wing. He, and still more his closest colleague, Goebbels, were socialists, and the fact they were nationalists first did not orient them more to the right.
There are six indispensable hallmarks of a conservative.
First, firm belief in one, beneficent and omnipotent God.
Second, absolute morality as the basis of public law.
Third, strict limits on the size of the state.
Fourth, respect for a multiplicity of traditional power centres.
Fifth, restraint and self-restraint in all things.
Sixth, search for the right balance between the individual and the traditional units of society.
Hitler broke all these rules: he was an atheistic pagan, a moral relativist, a totalitarian, an ultra-centralist, an uninhibited exhibitionist and a collectivist. In many ways Stalin was to the right of him. There is a seventh point. A conservative is not afraid of force, or of using it thoroughly. But always as a last resort. With Hitler it was the first."
