Springtime for Fascism
One of the stranger aspects of contemporary American “mainstream conservatism” is the obsession with “fascism,” a political philosophy one might have supposed was safely buried under the rubble of 1945 Europe. National Review and The Weekly Standard are full of dire warnings about the dangers posed by “Islamofascism,” and Jonah Goldberg is being hailed by the likes of Glenn Beck and Hugh Hewitt as an intellectual giant for his new best seller in which he critiques fascism of the “liberal,” American variety. National Review Online has created a new weblog for Goldberg, where he can both promote his book and himself and dispense his wisdom on all matters “fascist.” And all manner of lesser neocon bloggers are busying themselves uncovering the alleged “fascist” roots of everything they oppose.
One of the reasons I find this phenomenon strange is because my own understanding of conservatism was formed by reading National Review for many years, beginning as a sophomore in high school. In addition to reading the current issues of the magazine, I wrote a paper on James Burnham in college, which prompted me to read not only most of Burnham’s books, but all of his pieces in NR from the beginning of the magazine until his stroke, as well as many other articles in the magazine from 1955 until 1978. The impression conveyed was that “fascism” no longer existed, except as a term of abuse by the left, and that many leaders denounced as “fascists” were in fact statesmen and patriots, including Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet. Not only did Burnham admire Franco, but he was succeeded as the magazine’s foreign affairs columnist by Brian Crozier, a biographer of Franco who was fulsome in his praise for the Spanish dictator. Burnham and Crozier would certainly have been astonished to learn that the greatest threat facing America in 2008 apparently would be “fascism,” a word that George Orwell correctly noted “has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
Of course, while the old NR was deprecating concerns about “fascism,” many other political quarters were full of denunciations of “fascists” and dropping of the F-word. But those denunciations came from the Left, including the Communist Left. There is a reason Communists routinely denounced their enemies as “fascist.” If “fascism” were seen as the embodiment of political evil, the Communists’ own crimes would be overlooked and ultimately forgotten. This strategy has been remarkably successful, as shown by the plethora of movies still being made over 60 years after the death of Hitler about the crimes committed by the Nazis, and the paucity of movies made about the crimes committed by a political system that killed 100,000,000 people, that threatened America for decades, and that still imprisons thousands in such places as China, Cuba, and North Korea. Nazism is dead, but it lives forever in our imaginations. Communist Parties still rule millions of people, but there is reluctance to even call Communists “Communist.” I have even seen Red China described as a “fascist” state by a NRO regular. Who will remember those millions killed by the Communists now that even conservatives strain to label their opponents as “fascists,” thereby validating the view that the greatest political evil that ever existed, or could ever exist, is “fascism?”
The hallmark of real fascism was extreme nationalism, often coupled with white racism and anti-Semitism. Yet under the influence of Trotskyites like Christopher Hitchens, conservatives now regularly label jihadists—who oppose white racism and disdain the nation-state and long for the Caliphate—as “Islamofascists.” Moslems have been waging war against the West virtually from the time of Mohammed, but apparently what makes the jihadists evil is an imagined similarity between them and Hitler and Mussolini.
The need to label everything conservatives oppose as “fascist” hardly stops with Osama bin Laden and his ilk. Goldberg sees FDR and the New Deal as “fascist,” even though FDR was far more eager to wage war against Hitler than was the contemporary American Right, which remained true to the traditional American foreign policy enunciated by George Washington in his Farewell Address. What is significant about Roosevelt is not that some New Dealers shared the same admiration of Mussolini voiced by Winston Churchill—“Roman genius… the greatest lawgiver among men”—but Roosevelt’s willingness to discard the legacy of the Founders, both in the domestic arena and in foreign policy. Indeed, it is odd that Goldberg wants FDR to be remembered for his “fascism” when his Administration did not contain a single spy for Hitler or Mussolini but was honeycombed with agents of Stalin.
Goldberg and his admirers also seem not to fully appreciate that what so thoroughly discredited fascism was not the domestic policies of Mussolini’s Italy, but the aggressive wars waged by the Fascist dictators, culminating in the horrific Nazi crimes of World War II. Mussolini was largely admired before he invaded Ethiopia, and it is unlikely that he would be remembered as he is today if he had not cast his lot with Hitler. It is of course true that Hitler was not a laissez-faire capitalist, but as John Lukacs points out in The Hitler of History, Hitler was largely indifferent to economics. Of course, there are also far less emotionally charged historical models for corporatism than Mussolini’s Italy, such as Social Democratic Sweden. Thus arguing that support for state regulation of the economy is somehow Hitlerian or “fascist” is intellectually dishonest.
It is also intellectually dishonest to argue that the sort of foreign policy favored by Goldberg and the other “anti-fascists” at NR is in any way Hitlerian. But Goldberg is so committed to an aggressive U.S. foreign policy that he argued on his Liberal Fascism blog on Feb. 24 that “conservative dogma is the great bulwark against fascism or fascistic policies in part because it breaks the historic linkage between activist foreign policies abroad and totalitarian impulses at home.” In other words, even though those who like invading other countries have often also liked building up the state and curtailing freedom at home, crusading around the world for “democracy” and invading foreign countries at will is now okay and definitely not “fascist”—as long as you still want to repeal the “death tax.” Goldberg and all the other budding “anti-fascists” on the right would do well to remember that Hitler is consigned to infamy not because of the Autobahn, but because of his own “activist foreign policy,” and that the Americans who opposed the New Deal also vigorously opposed FDR’s “activist foreign policy.” It is time for American conservatives to stop looking for spurious historical parallels to the policies of long-dead European regimes, and to rediscover the traditional policies of our Founders, including an unwillingness to meddle at home or abroad.
[Kudos to ”All 4 Humor” for documentary photo of house pet suspected of liberal fascism]
Comments
Mr. Piatak has given us another excellent piece. I wonder how much longer the fascist bogeyman will resonate with the American people. The neocons may have to resuscitate another threat, while undercutting the Right. What will it be? Islamo-Burkeanism?
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Goldberg’s book contains many gross historical errors, as I try to show in my review in The Mises Review. http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=326
Goldberg responds on his blog to nearly every review or mention of his book, but he has so far said nothing in response to me.
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I just posted on this on my Odysseus on the . So I’ll just reproduce it here with the indulgence of the editor.
Visiting National Review online is like driving past the old family home, now run down and in a very bad neighborhood. A morbid fascination keeps bringing us back to see the latest insult. So while WFB is till above ground I thought I’d see how the new lot would take the loss of their patriarch. There was a very empathetic and well written piece by Christopher Hitchens.
And then I stumbled on, or perhaps stepped in, Jonah Goldberg’s Blog. The Blog is devoted entirely to thumping the tub for his own sophmoric book “Liberal Fascism.” A lot better wits than mine have had their fun at the expense of Goldberg. So I needn’t pile on. Yet the spectacle of A “serious” magazine of opinion devoting it resources to marketing the product of one of its editors under the rubric of a blog is just so low rent that I’m actually surprised. And it takes a bit to surprise me. If this Isn’t money changers in the temple it will certainly do till the actual thing comes along.
The blog is an exercise in narcissism masquerading (badly) as commentary on the many bad reviews by adults the book seems to have garnered. I scanned the to and fro of Goldberg’s responses to his readers until I came on the following exchange.
“The We Already Know This Canard”
From a reader:
Mr. Goldberg,
I’ve finally figured out what I find so unsatisfying about the complaints of Tomasky and others. It seems to me that the standard practice when reviewing a book that is allegedly derivative or unnecessary is to recommend the acknowledged authoritative book on the subject. Funny that in all the reviews I’ve read of LF I haven’t seen a single one that suggested an alternative book to read on the subject of Progressivism and fascism. To me that says that those amongst the left who do know about this history don’t want it talked about. Not because it’s old hat or too boring, but for the same reason you don’t talk about your grandparents locking Crazy Aunt Mabel in the attic; it’s too embarrassing and shameful.
Condolences on the passing of Mr. Buckley.
Me: This is a very good point. Since I can say with pretty much total certainty that there is no other single book that comes close to collecting all of these facts in one place, you would think some honest liberal reviewers would say “Goldberg’s all wrong on his interpretation of the facts, but these things are worth knowing.”
What is one to say in the face of such ignorant self regard? Let’s see, a book highlighting the essentially authoritarian genesis of the liberal left? Oh yes I can think of one. I believe it was called Leftism Revisited by the late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Doubtless young Jonah overlooked this book and its author. After all he was just some PhD Austrian fellow employed as the European correspondent for the National Review for about thirty years! As Jonah might say, Who Knew? The book, for those born yesterday and raised under the new post literate dispensation under which Jonah was apparently raised, is magisterial, well researched and footnoted with with original sources. It is in short, everything that Liberal Fascism is not. Of course, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn had the advantage of both knowing what Fascism was and having met a lot of actual Fascists.
Old testament sailors had the sense to throw Jonah’s namesake overboard. When will the adults at National Review show the same sense?
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Ooops! That was on Odysseus on the Rocks@blogspot
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Tom,
Frankly, I think it is something of a mistake to engage Goldberg and others like him as you have here. It tends to lend credence to the mischaracterization these folks have for so long made about themselves: That they represent a point of view that is somehow to be distinguished from the fascism they seek to lay at the doorstep of others. I note that one commentator here, David Gordon, complains of being ignored by Goldberg when posting at his blog concerning his book. This kind of an attempt to marginalize has long been a tactic of those wishing to arrogate to themselves the mantle of orthodoxy when diverse claims to the title exist and it is a favorite in the neo-con tool box. Is it not time to call them what they are and to disengage from the kind of discussion that shores-up the notion that these folks are simply a variety of the same overarching phenomenon represented by the viewpoint put forth by so many at this blog. Goldberg and those with whom he associates are National Socialists and should be identified as such. They are routinely so identified by the anti-system left and appropriately. Its time to step back from the contestation over who it is that legitimately describes themselves as “conservatives” as that question has in the last decade or so utterly resolved itself. You can call them Nazis now; that’s what they are.
John Lowell
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Fair comment John. But I never attempted to post on National Review on Line. What’s the point? I posted here for our amusement.
As to the Neo-cons as Nazis, Can you imagine John Podhoretz in any uniform save that of a janitor? The Nazis were of course evil. But they were in many ways a sort of veterans league gone bad. These clowns are just veterans of Catskills summer camp! Besides, to be a National Socialist you have to have a nation don’t you, not just a tribe.
By exposing them as twisted little schemers we can hit them where they live, in their funding. Without Murdock money and right wing foundation jobs and backing they would be nothing.
Still your larger point is true. They are fond of national projects, not at all averse to large government and fond of scapegoating others.
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Bravo to David Gordon for outing Goldberg for what he is. Nothing.
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Very perceptive article by Tom Piatak. The problem is that Jonah Goldberg, like those on the Left that he is supposedly attacking, does not really undertand historical fascism, and uses it as a term of opprobrium, just like the left does. But over fifty years of faulty ideological application by the Left has left the term neutered of meaning. Just about anyone, or anything, that is disagreeable is now or can now be termed “fascist.” Goldberg’s lack of historical perspective and self-congratulatory pose as an intellectual are embarrassing.
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“ And all manner of lesser neocon bloggers are busying themselves uncovering the alleged “fascist” roots of everything they oppose.”
It’s called projection, where the neocon sociopath projects his owned evil on the victim.
Here is how the parallels draw up between the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza....
The plight of the Palestinians and the the history of the Jews that led to their mass exodus from their own countries draw a parallel, Arab News said on Sunday.
The Warsaw Ghetto during the Jewish Holocaust holds special significance to the European Jews. It was a place of oppression and the pathway to the ultimate death of thousands of their population that has become symbolic with their struggle for recognition.
Yet what they are failing to acknowledge as their descendants press forward with their own brand of Jewish and Zionist idealism is the parallel set of conditions that they are now imposing on the Arab people of Palestine.
The Nazis rounded up the Jews of Poland and quartered them in a small area of Warsaw, building a barricade around the perimeter to prevent them leaving. So too have the Israelis through conflict and force pushed many of the Arab inhabitants out of Israel into an enclave that now has a population density of 4,200 people per sq. km which is 14 times that of the surrounding area of Israel which has 360 people per sq. km.
The Nazis deprived the ghetto inhabitants of food and essential supplies. So too has the Israeli government stopped the flow of goods to the 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza by limiting the convoys of supplies to a mere trickle.
The Nazis reduced the average calorie intake of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto to 241 calories per day. So too have the Israelis reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza.
According to a UN report, it is presently at 61 percent of the average daily requirements.
The Nazis restricted public utilities such as water and electricity. So too has Israel done in Gaza Strip.
The Nazis restricted the inhabitants from adequate health care.
Israelis restrict the health care in Gaza by limiting the medical supplies in or the treatment of cases that need to be done outside.
The Jewish inhabitants through the ZZB and the ZOB resisted the oppression by the Nazis albeit too late and their rebellion was brutally crushed without concern for who was in the way. So too have the Palestinians of Gaza through their own resistance organizations, in particular Hamas, rebelled against their oppressors and so too do the Israelis use all means available to crush the rebellion without concern for who is in the way or who they maim or kill in doing so.
The Nazis destroyed the structure of the ghetto leveling it to the ground in a broad quest to rout the resistance to their oppression.
Israelis indiscriminately level buildings and the infrastructure in Gaza in a quest to rout out the resistance to their oppression.
The Nazis assigned the Jewish people to a lesser status of all their inhabitants depriving them of their rights as citizens and even as humans. Israel assigns the refugees held in Gaza less status than is given to the Jews worldwide and deprives the Palestinians of their rights to return to their former lands.
The Nazis applied whatever was at their means to break the will of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto. Israelis do the same thing; they use whatever is at their means to break the will of the Palestinians.
The Nazis killed the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto
indiscriminately. Don’t the Israelis kill indiscriminately the inhabitants in forcing their control over Gaza?
The Jews of Israel and elsewhere are quite right to protest at the inhumanity of the Nazis in their treatment of them and oblige the world not to allow the same situation to happen again. The Palestinians protest at the inhumanity of the Israeli treatment, yet in a bizarre twist of events, the world still allows the oppression to happen and continue.
It was after the Jews in the ghetto had been largely killed or transported that the world stood up and felt guilty in not acting sooner.
With the picture of Mohammed Al-Borai in my mind I question when the world will stand up and say: Enough is enough, there is not going to be a repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto and particularly when its perpetrators are those who suffered the most by its conduct.
There is a basic conflict of inhumanity occurring to the Palestinian people of Gaza that the world is deliberately ignoring.
An inhumanity that was inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto is now more than ever closely paralleling that which they are inflicting on the people of Gaza.
They learned a hard lesson but it was not a lesson learned well.
They have been given the power to practice humanity but have decided instead that they will treat the concerns of the Palestinians in the same inhumane way the Nazis treated them.
A future monument will no doubt contain photos of Mohammed Al-Borai in the arms of his father and the world will decry the injustice.
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The primary motivation for the neo-cons to hate the “fascists” is that the fascist’s antisemitism is in contradiction to the neo-con’s philosemitism. The fascists saw the Jewish influence on culture as, overall, a very negative one, and the neo-cons see the Jewish influence as overall a very positive one. In today’s terms, for the neo-cons, unless one is on the side of Israel, one is probably a fascist/nazi. Raining death and destruction on any opponent of Israel is really only the good guys beating the bad guys and collateral damage is to be expected. Also for neocons, the non-philosemite (or anybody who recognizes a double-standard in the way Israel is treated) should be portrayed thinly veiled as someone willing to mass murder innocents (especially Jews), if given half a chance. Economic or political theory is secondary to all this.
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In a recent interview with Israel’s leading liberal newspaper, the New Republic editor in chief Marty Peretz stated that Palestinian Arabs should not be allowed to govern themselves. The link and quote are below, but just think how much Peretz sounds like a white Southern Democrat defending Jim Crow.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/953302.html
The Palestinians, Marty Peretz says, need to be governed by foreign powers for the time being, because they “do not have yet the attributes to allow them to live peacefully alongside Israel without threatening its civilian population.”
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In the meanwhile its nice to see the muslims acknowledge what a bunch of backward underachievers they they are sorely in need of our help:
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=200832\story_2-3-2008_pg3_6
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Johah Goldberg is a bully, a coward and an un-American fool. This is from a piece I wrote that appeared in Freedom Daily:
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0709d.asp
“Jonah Goldberg is of military age, though, like Continetti, not of military inclination. From the safety of his perch at National Review Online, Goldberg declares himself an admirer of what he calls the “Ledeen Doctrine,” which, as articulated by American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Ledeen, affirms that “every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” The putrefying morality and obscene bullying manifest in Continetti, Goldberg, and Ledeen are not eccentricities in neocon nation but, rather, the very soul of neocon nation. Ledeen’s American Enterprise Institute, after all, earned congratulations from Bush as the place where ‘some of the finest minds in our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation.’”
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My previous link had a problem, those underachieving muslims:
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\03\02\story_2-3-2008_pg3_6
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Here is how one Muslim society reacts to “the most dangerous country in the world” fascist neocon media campaign:
Undeperforming backward muslims:
THE OTHER COLUMN: Drat! — Ejaz Haider
We always under-perform, regardless of whether the action is good or bad. We were supposed to be the most dangerous place in the world. And what do we do? We hold elections, elect mainstream parties, defeat religious groups and in doing all this completely disappoint the world
Difficult it is to reconcile with the feeling that there mayn’t be any sphere of life or national activity where we can excel, or at which having excelled, maintain our supremacy. Consider.
We reigned supreme in field hockey. Teams played us not to win but hoping to lose gracefully. Today, as KH would put it in his inimitable style, even Charlie’s aunt can kick our ass. The world of squash, our bailiwick for over three decades, is lost to us. Cricket, the sport in which we have invested so much, lies unravelled. What is wrong with us?
We always under-perform, regardless of whether the action is good or bad. We were supposed to be the most dangerous place in the world. And what do we do? We hold elections, elect mainstream parties, defeat religious groups and in doing all this completely disappoint the world. The world will now have to find another candidate. What a shame.
This is enough to be sad about. But I am devastated since Friday evening. Just when I thought that we were the best and the most committed nation to crotch-scratching, an exercise to which the shalwar lends itself beautifully, news comes that the Italians have been at it to the point where “the phrase ‘io mi tocco i...’, or ‘I touch my...’, is still used in much the same way as ‘touch wood’ is in English”.
Drat! But I should have known better. One theory on the similarity between ‘testes’, ‘test’, ‘testify’ and ‘testimony’ says the Romans, when testifying before a court, always put their right hands on the crotch.
Now of course things are changing and courts do not like men going around testifying in public. The Italian court of cessation, the highest court of appeal in that country, has ruled that it is a criminal offence for a man to scratch, adjust or even manipulate himself in public, thank you.
The Guardian, the paper muesli-eating liberals love to read, attributes this to Italian folklore according to which, “a swift grasp of one’s generative organs – known by Italians as their ‘attributi’ – protects against bad luck”.
When the going gets tough, the hand gets going. Which is just as well because in times of crisis and utter faarigh-ul baali one can’t think of anything better to do than scratch one’s crotch.
Punjabi has a special expression for attending to one’s ‘attributi’. It’s called t***** khurkana and figuratively means being idle. Idleness also has a sinister link with unemployment as the jobless in the Q League, which governed this country for five years, will tell you. When they are not cursing Mr Shaukat Aziz, they are scratching their crotches and sometimes doing both.
Actually, there was at least one minister in the previous government who began practising it while on the job. He was on a tv programme and after squirming for a while decided the camera could go to hell. With the obvious itch of one in need of a good scratch, and the target area placed as it is, he raised one leg and dived for it. In raising the leg thus, the minister also raised the status of the act. It was, in all fairness, the highlight of the show.
Anyway, the point was that even in diving crotchwards we have been out-dived by the Italians. Our only hope now lies in the court verdict which is likely to discourage this activity to a point where healthy Italian men will be forced to attend to their generative organs in private. And that is about as genuine as non-alcoholic drinks.
The court of appeal is reported to have said in its ruling that a hand-to-crotch approach “has to be regarded as an act contrary to public decency, a concept… requiring everyone to abstain from conduct potentially offensive to collectively-held feelings of decorum”.
I hope that this will, over time, make Italian men squeamish enough for Italy to fall behind us in publicly executing an act whose satisfaction can only be testified to by those who possess what it takes to testify.
I am also confident of this because the Italian court’s verdict is likely to sync with the rise, post-election, of groin-scratching in this country.
One reason I am so taken in by democracy is because it is a great leveller. The average Nathu in this country has always been wedded to his crotch in many ways, scratching and fondling it whenever the itch arises or the Muse comes calling which is most of the time during waking hours. With the former ministers doing the same, elections have definitely thrown up a more egalitarian society.
Postscript: By the way, if anyone finds the mention of this national pastime offensive, counting out the feminazis, he may want to take a look at Farhangay Aasfiya or find a pre-partition unexpurgated edition of Feroz-ul Lughaat. This may not be taksaali but with the dawn of democracy it’s about time we brought the kharri boli into the mainstream. That’s the combination that made English what it is and Shakespeare what he is.
In any case, democracy is all about the awam. So help us God!
Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at
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I hope Paul Craig Roberts reads this piece.
Even the BNP calls the Labour Party “fascist” now.
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A similar issue is how words like Marxism and communism now popularly only refer to economics as if there was never anything more to them (because we’ve embraced many of the other parts.)
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Re FDR and “fascist”: I think it was James Burnham, cited admiringly by Mr. Piatak, who called the New Deal “fascism without shirts”.
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It is true that the neocons have retained the “fascist” line from their leftist days. However, Goldberg seems to be correct in seeing statism as both a part of modern leftist politics and of fascism. Many conservatives did denounce the New Deal for its resemblances to Italian fascist domestic programs—state regulation, regimentation, mania for public works, the all-powerful fearless leader, etc. The problem is that the neocons themselves are so invested in the statist program and that they see the problem as one of similarity to Axis governments and nto as one of submission to modernity itself.
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Tom is to be commended for going after the usual rot
from the predictable fans of the war against
“Islamo-fascism.” I for one think that the
anti-fascism being pushed by the NR circle and AEI
may be infinitely more dangerous than what most
garden-variety fascists of the 1930s, such as
Mussolini, the leaders of the Falange, and the
Austrian clerical fascists, intended to or could do.
After all, these fascists were attached to minor
powers and usually fighting some internal leftist
revolutionary force. What we now have are Wilsonian
warmongers calling for armed struggles against the
“anti-democrats” by the world’s only
superpower. And this leftist anti-fascist hysteria
has become a hallmark of the only Right that the
American media is willing to recognize.
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Some observations
FDR was closer to fascism than to bolcheviquism.
If nothing else he lacked a coherent central
doctrine and kind of muddled through ("try something,
if it works, repeat it, if not try something else, but
for God’s sake, keep trying"). In times of crisis, it
made more sense than to hold on to an ideology that
said that some things should not be done, because of
later bad consequences (as the English did during the
Irish famine, when they refused to grant relief, because
it would go against the free market. One million dead
is a small price to pay for ideological purity...)
It is no surprise that FDR would be the one to go to
war with fascism. For one thing, foreign allies and
enemies are not chosen on the basis of ideology but on
geopolitical reasons - actually such choices are kind of
an abnormality in the power politics game - it reminds
me of the observation of Charles V “Of course, King
Francis (of France) want the same things. We both want
Italy”. So, in this FDR reverted to older
pre-ideological considerations. Even in WWII, the fact
that both Greece and Italy were fascists dictatorships
did not keep Mussolini from invading Greece.
And it is not surprising on any that FRD would go down
in history as having vanquished fascism, even if he
was one himself. It is as surprising as finding out
that the dog who protects the flock is a close relative
of the wolf who savages it. The fact is that the more
things are oppositne, the less likely they will meet,
much less influecne each other, so if something has
to be opposed it has to be by something close enough
in powers and mental processes to figure out what to
do.
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Neither was pre-war Poland was a democracy.
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History is-a made at night.
Character is what you are in-a the dark.
Your greatest joy is the joy of duty.
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Bravo to the author! It seems that neocons and libertarians alike enjoy identifying any kind of statism (which they oppose) with fascism, which empties the meaning of this term. If welfarism were identical to fascism, then fascism would indeed be on the march across the western world.
That great libertarian Jefferson condoned certain forms of statism too (loyalty oaths, prosecutions for “sedition,” trade embargos, etc.) Yet was Jefferson a fascist? Other than Conor Cruise O’Brien, few readers would go this far.
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Neocon liars believe if they constantly keep linking Muslim countries to Nazi Germany American sheeple will support Bush’s trillion dollar folly.
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Glen Beck hailing anybody as an intellectual giant is akin to Lizzie Borden hailing someone as a paragon of peace and human restraint. Oh, and I suppose when the abject solipsist Goldberg claims that the policies of this neo-con infested Government “break the link between International Intervention and Totalitarian Actions at home”, he thinks spying upon Americans via their own telecomunications systems is somehow a light-hearted affair.
That these people are payed for their sorely counter-intuitive commentary is the crowning achievement of the Revolution Within the Form described by Garet Garrett.
These raving lunatics, to a man and woman remind me of a group of serial failures who establish a clan of KKK Re-enactors to replace Clowns at the birthday parties of the 10 and under set. Some people might find it a thrilling substitution but even a 7 year old could see the spirit dampening effects of a lynching over his birthday cake.
Like Burke said “Criminal Means once tolerated are soon to be preferred. This sis fascism fer dummies and the Rubocrats can’t hang enough bunting in support of it. Glen Beck, paid for his opinion and Goldberg paid for his scribbling, whot an unimpeachable farrago.
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Much correct, a little incorrect.
1. Mr. P. is correct that Mussolini’s movement was unique, and Boyd Cathey is correct to demand exactness in definition. So to define: Lower case fascism is Ultranationalism, be it ethnic/tribalist or racialist. Roger Griffin then gives fascism an even more precise definition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Griffin Upper case Fascism, Benito’s movement, wasn’t racialist at all until 1938, and was only secondarily nationalist. For fascism, Leviathan is the servant of the Volk; for Fascism, Leviathan will make with fist and jackboot the various Italian Völker into one Volk. Instead of being primarily nationalist, Fascism primarily is the political expression of a military movement, the Arditi morphing into the Squadristi, and even more the political expression of an aesthetic movement, Futurism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
It would not be incorrect to all most modern architecture “quasi-Fascist”.
2. Mr. P. is correct that Commies get a free ride, however close this might skirt to the Tu Quoque fallacy.
3. Mr. P. is correct that Osama is pursuing a religious war, not a Ultranationalist one, and thus to call him an “Islamofascist” is just buncombe. We haven’t had a religious war in the West since the battle of the Boyne, and we’ve forgotten that such wars work on different dynamics than Nationalist ones. By the way, the conflict in Palestine and Balkans, from what I can tell, is most likely nationalist, not religious.
4. Mr. P. is correct also that libertarians are wrong to call FDR, a social democrat, a “fascist”. That both Social Democracy, Fascism, fascism, Communism, Cultural Marxism, and the Whigs are statist is true enough. “Hobbes is the father of us all” (almost). Still these movements differ considerably. It could be argued that Corporatism and Syndicalism can be, at least theoretically, more non-statist than statist.
5. Partly incorrect: what so thoroughly discredited fascism was not the domestic policies of Mussolini’s Italy, but the aggressive wars waged by the Fascist dictators, culminating in the horrific Nazi crimes of World War II. True only in part: The crimes in addition to wars of aggression were racialism and Judeophobia. And Benito’s domestic policies were hardly anything to boast about.
6. Paul Gottfried is correct to mention in passing Clerical Fascism and clerical fascism, an omission in Mr. P’s article. To be fair, Mr. P didn’t have space to mention everything on the topic.
7. It must be said emphatically that fascism and Fascism are real threats, as anyone who reads writebacks on this site knows. And fascism and Fascism and their clerical forms are not Burkean/Tory/Blanc conservatism, however much such conservatives may have been and may be fascists’ and Fascists “useful idiots”.
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In the old DDR aka the German “Democractic” Republic, that era of National-socialist misrule was NEVER referred to as the National-Socialist era, but as the time of NS-fascism. What one can’t enunciate, one abbreviates.
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Multi nemici, molto onore.
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“jihadists—who oppose white racism”
Jihadists are entirely indifferent to white racism, as far as I can tell. Arabs generally look down on black Africans, and Jihadists share neo-Nazis’ obsession with anti-Semitism, but racism as such just isn’t relevant. Any talk of racism is to help keep the Western Left on side.
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Neither was pre-war Poland was a democracy.
Democracy (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with whether a State is fascist.
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I have mixed feelings about Mr. Goldberg and his book. I feel he was onto something, but wasted it because he couldn’t overcome his political partisan tendencies. No doubt some of the progressives of the 1930’s and 40’s were googly-eyed over Mussolini, but the bulk of the Left looked more toward Moscow than Rome.
As for contemporary manifestations of “fascism,” I think it is far more evident in the Right than the Left. While many liberals and leftists have been speaking up about the lapse of civil liberties and unchecked interventionist foreign policy, it is the “conservatives” that have been the loudest in demanding that our civil liberties be diminished and every nasty dictator be overthrown in the name of fighting “terrorism.” There in lays the problem for Jonah, he has chosen to ignore the fascistic rot going on in his own movement (including his own magazine).
Honestly, I would really like Jonah to explain what is the difference between the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush. Either way, Jonah should be remained that war is the health of the state, whether that war is concocted by Wilson-types or Jonah’s neocon fellow travelers.
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Jonah Goldberg is all the result of a stain on Monica Lewinski’s dress.Without that he is a nobody.
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