On Liberal Fascism:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

As this book keeps recurring as a topic in this community, I'll remind the apologists for this particular piece of fishwrap what exactly it is that they're trying to claim as high scholarship on international fascism of the 1920s through the 1940s:

Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

_______________

So, let's have a look-see. WEB Du Bois is this guy:



......

Yes, I totally see it! The guy who invented modern civil rights tactics would be absolutely fond of a pan-German Jew hater like Hitler.

Wilson hardly could have espoused fascism given that it didn't exist until the HARDING Administration and by then he was insensible from strokes. Mussolini, an ex-socialist, invented the movement. I suppose Wilson also had magic voodoo powers to influence events before they even happened.

I also hardly think the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Legion_of_America counts as "friendly." 

Someone also ought to talk to Goldberg about his misogyny issues. I mean, really, a schoolteacher giving a hug is equal to Babi Yar. *snerk*.

And that Irving Berlin song?

It goes like this:

In Japan our hands are tied, ve don't like it.
Mussolini's on our side, ve don't like it.

So those on this community that reference this particular book that could more or less define the TVTropes Critical Research Failure on its own........this is what you're referencing. And this, BTW, is why I have a hard time taking anything the Goldberg apologists say seriously.

Comments

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Cut?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Done.

[mybodymycoffin.livejournal.com]

Does... does he provide some kind of reference showing du Bois admired Hitler's Germany?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The same ones to cite that a hug from a schoolteacher with a degree from Brown is equal to SS death squads gunning Jews down in cold blood and burying alive any of them unfortunate enough not to have been killed by the machine guns.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

The book is very well referenced, but 5 seconds on Google offered this (http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.ghi-dc.org/files/publications/bu_supp/supp5/supp5_099.pdf&pli=1) up in the meantime.

The sort of mocking tone about this tells me that underlankers either hasn't read the book at all or made zero effort in trying to disprove the claim.

[weswilson]

The entire concept of elected Democratic politicians being fascist is just laughable. Almost everything in the Democratic platform contradicts the fundamental of fascism on ever level. Other than the Republicrat habit of always putting business first, I see no similarities.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It is laughable. The Book itself is laughable.

[debergerac.livejournal.com]

are you comparing democrats today with democrats of the 1930's?

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

What does fascism mean to him? Seriously... I don't know of one "liberal" who wants a military dictatorship state. The concept doesn't even make sense in a fantasy context?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Fascism simply means "bad people." It has no relationship to the actual interwar totalitarian movement that pioneered such things as death squads and ethnic cleansing as a solution to the issue of integrating minorities into new states.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

To quote (http://calitreview.com/303):

I’ve got a long definition in the book, but a short one would be an instinctual religious impulse – usually gussied-up as a secular or modern ideology – that seeks to impose uniformity in thought and action throughout the entire society. All oars in a fascistic society must pull together. The personal is political because everything goes together. Political correctness is one name we give to such efforts in civil society.

The military aspect is a definite pattern, but not a necessity.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Bravo!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

When you're right, you're right. And in this case I do agree that anyone holding that book as an example of anything beyond a book to be mercilessly and ruthlessly mocked needs to be reminded that Jonah Goldberg is simply a man who writes books because his parents subsidized him. Liberal fascism is to history what The Inheritance Quadrilogy is to fantasy.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

"The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood.... and other various things I don't like."

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's basically his message, yes.

But does anyone besides me see the rather sharp irony of referring to the elites of *Hollywood* as *Nazis*? Only an idiot would fail to note the Jew-hatin' that just wants to scream "Fear the Elders of Zion" but has not the balls to do it.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Compare and contrast W E B DuBois (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_e_b_dubois) and George Lincoln Rockwell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lincoln_Rockwell)

Some people simply have no idea what constitutes a Nazi. This is why you need to either spend more money on education....or be prepared to beat education into the little blighters at the end of a cane when they are at school.

Aut disce, aut discede, manet sors tertia caedi.

(When it comes to education, I'm a total Stalinist: though 'Liberal' on just about all other matters. Years of frustrating conversation with ignorant folk who should have known better is my only excuse.)

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

To be frank, the old communist bloc regimes in Europe were quite strong on education, especially in the sciences (obviously management science being an exception, since it was subordinated to the party line).

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

At this point, having read the post and your responses...have you even read the thing?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes......I have. It's a ridiculous book suited only to wrap fish in.

He presents a ludicrous argument that modern-day progressives, who have such lukewarm mealy-mouthed ideas that they couldn't make use of having the Executive and overwhelming majorities of both houses of Congress, are equal to the interwar and WWII-era fascists who had armed paramilitaries, introduced strategic bombing into warmaking, and used death squads with abandon. A hug is equal to being slain in a gas chamber or having a dog fetus sown into a human womb.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Modernism gave birth to two major political forces: Communism and Fascism. That they were both C20th post-Industrial Revolution ideologies doesn't actually mean they were the same.

Totalitarianism can and does have many different expressions: was Sparta fascist? Did Plato argue for fascism, or for that matter Thomas More?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Or Lord Shang.

The first totalitarianism in practice was the Qin Empire, which is the reason we think of a unified China as the natural order of things. Now *that's* a successful totalitarian state.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

"Fascism (pronounced /ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and systems, including the political system and the economy.

Replace the word Nationalist with Globalist and you have the Political ideals of Barack Obama and the entire Democan Party. Still they are not Fascists and there are significant differences beyond just the switch from nationalism to globalism including among other things the relegation of the military to a subservient rather than a leading role however the policies espoused by the Democan leadership is closer to this fascist ideal, especially in economic matters than it is separated from it. The reason why people keep making the connection between the neo mercantilist corporatism that has taken over America's Political leadership and Fascism is simply because no word currently exists to define it as a movement.

They are not Fascists
They are not Socialists
They are not even Social Democrats
and they sure as hell aren't Capitalists.

The problem is we lack a word to define what they are and so we are left making apt but imperfect connections to things they are not quite.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, actually fascism is not corporatism. One could argue the current US system *is* de facto ruled by the large corporations, but the actual fascist movements were mass totalitarian movements where the totalitarian ideology, in contrast to that of the Leninists was not for an economic agenda but to benefit one particular ethnos at the expense of others. Nation-Statism, as in statism for the benefit of one nation, be it Croatian, Romanian, Austrian, German, Italian, Hungarian, or what have you.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.

What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for the better part of the past century. Robert O. Paxton, in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first genuine fascist organization, a suggestion that Goldberg airily dismisses with the dumb explanation that the Klan of the 1920s disliked Mussolini and his adherents because they were Italian (somewhat true for a time but irrelevant in terms of their ideological affinities, which were substantial enough that by the 1930s, historians have noted, there were frequent operative associations between Klan leaders and European fascists).

Review of the book called "Jonah Goldberg's Bizzaro History"

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's very like Creationism in that regard.

To address the point about McCarthy is simple-he served on HUAC the whole time with a real Soviet spy.

I'm surprised Malkin attempted to justify abuses by that ebil fascist Roosevelt, though. /snerk. I wonder what Goldberg's thesis, which states FDR was in fact a fascist, means about Malkin's book?

A good excuse to use this icon

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson

You know, tenets like suppressing free speech and imposing racial segregation, things that Wilson did.

I'd be a little more careful of accusing others of doing sloppy research if I were you.

Re: A good excuse to use this icon

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Of course if he had the slightest bit of understanding he'd not have used segregation but Wilson's habit of imprisoning anyone who made the least bit critical statement about him in a political prison. But instead he complains that Wilson re-segregated the government. Which is true, but frankly the miracle was that TR actually *de*-segregated it in a time when horrible race riots were all too common.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

You see, it's like fascism, except for the part about schoolteachers. Hey, the point is, democracy needs a guiding hand.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Without even trying to figure out whether your claim is accurate or not (that the particular quote you gave is wrong), none of your comments support your assertion. Let's go in order:

1. You seem to think that Du Bois not being fond of Hitler somehow means that his ideas aren't similar to fascism. Basically you are claiming that someone dislikes some or even most of something then that means that they never like anything related to that, which is patently false.

2. You are focusing on the term "fascism" as opposed to the ideas that are fascist. The claim is that if you compare Wilson's Progressive ideas to Mussolini's fascist ones, there will be close similarities. Your objection doesn't dispute that.

3. Deliberately splitting the term "friendly fascist" into two terms doesn't make your objection suddenly relevant.

4. Liberal schoolteachers are generally female, so your objection here is irrelevant.

5. I don't know anything about Irving Berlin.

6. I can only recall Goldberg being referenced here once, and I thought it was you doing it, but I could be wrong.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) Because a guy who's black is going to embrace a Nordicist ideal of killing off Slavs to build a giant pan-German Greater German Empire?

2) Erm.....Wilson took the USA into WWI in 1917 and did a horrible job with the peace afterward. Interwar fascism had nothing in common with his society.

3) Because there's so much that's friendly in the ideologies of Fascism (aka society should be organized for an Italian Ethnocracy where Fascism is the state and the state is Fascism) and Nazism (namely that all Germans should be united in a single Greater German Empire which should move east and kill all the Slavs, Gypsies, and Jews).

4) So no men schoolteachers are liberal?

5) Nor do you understand what the fascists and Nazis actually thought themselves.

6) Actually Paft references him more than I do, and Bogey, of course, and Jeff here try to argue with a straight face that hugs and schoolteachers are equivalent to asking a bunch of Jews and Poles to dig a grave, firing machine guns on them, and burying any survivors alive.

[debergerac.livejournal.com]

fascism notwitstanding, waasn't du bois an ardent admirer of that other guy with the funny mustache, josef stalin?

[telemann.livejournal.com]

For defeating Hitler yes.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, because all progressives are secret Pan-German nationalists who want to ensure all Germanophones are part of a single Greater Germany that moves east and eliminates all Slavs except the ones they want as slaves.

So......you do know that technically speaking race is a 17th Century innovation that has never worked out that great in terms of its history as a concept?

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Dear American Right Wing --

I am perfectly willing to accept that the Left Wing of the political spectrum spawned Stalin, Mao, Castro and Pol Pot. You guys have to accept Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. I'll even advocate equal time in historical venues condemning Communist Totalitarianism if it will make you stop squirming so much, but fair is fair. We may even get to the point where we both agree that Hitler's genocidal mania is not an inherent feature of either extreme end of the political spectrum.

Sincerely,

Malasadas

[debergerac.livejournal.com]

call me odd, but i view all murderous totalitarian dictators as an extreme all to themselves.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Yes, but badlydrawnjeff is very serious.