Jonah Goldberg is lying to you. Enumerating every one of his lies would practically fill a new book, so I’ll just start here with the biggest one.
”the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand…before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States…After the war, the American progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism. Accordingly, leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as “right-wing” and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre-fascist thought.”
Anyone going through periodical archives of the 20s and 30s, anyone reading writers of that era, knows that both liberals and conservatives associated fascism with the right wing well before WWII. Travel books of the 1930s, for instance, listed the Nazi party under right wing political groups, as did liberal magazines like The New Yorker and conservative magazines like Time. It took no “liberal sleight of hand” to associate fascism with the right.
...It’s fascinating to observe, for instance, how Goldberg handles the knotty problem of Henry Ford:
“Hitler said he was a great admirer of Henry Ford, though he didn’t mention Ford’s virulent anti-Semitism. What appealed to Hitler about Ford was that he ‘produces for the masses. That little car of his has done more than anything else to destroy class differences.’”
This is practically the only mention of Ford you will find in this book, and it strongly implies that Hitler’s main attraction to Ford was not Ford’s bigotry, but the fact that Ford produced cars “for the masses.”
It was Ford’s anti-Semitism and his beliefs about the superiority of “Anglo-Saxons” that made him a hero to the Nazis, who bought up translations of his book The International Jew at a tremendous rate. It was also his anti-Communism and, in spite of all Hitler’s rhetoric about eliminating “class differences,” Ford’s disdain for the concept of equality. Ford believed that there was “no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal,” a philosophy that jibed quite well with Hitler’s belief that “men are not of equal value or of equal importance.”
Nor is there much talk about the Spanish Civil War, an odd omission in any discussion of 20th century fascism. (But then, the number of leftists and liberals who flocked to Spain to fight fascism well before the Second World War wouldn’t do much for Goldberg’s claims about that liberal plot to associate fascism with the right after WWII, would it?) Nor is there much about such Hitler supporters in Germany as Emil Kirdorf, an industrialist “so reactionary that he called the policies of the Imperial government ‘dangerously radical’” because it “had allowed Bismarck’s antisocialist law to lapse.” (From Who Financed Hitler, by James and Suzanne Pool) or steel heir Fritz Thyssen.
What Goldberg is doing here is juxtaposing the complex politics of the 20th century against the ignorance of many 21st century young people who have apparently gleaned their notions about the rise of fascism from skimming novels or half-watching movies about it while they blog on their laptops. Goldberg then declares this historical ignorance to be the fault of liberals out to fool us all and presents facts well known to anyone who’s bothered to read up on the subject as if they were carefully hidden secrets. At the same time, he carefully omits facts that indicate the more widespread popularity of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco among their contemporaries on the right.
I’d be delighted to discuss it with you at greater length-- I'd especially like to have a cozy chat about the connection between Jonah Goldberg's eagerness to revise history and his admiration for the bloodthirsty policies of mass murderer Augusto Pinochet.
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Shortened Version of What I Posted back in 2008:
Date: 28/9/10 19:12 (UTC)Jonah Goldberg is lying to you. Enumerating every one of his lies would practically fill a new book, so I’ll just start here with the biggest one.
”the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand…before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States…After the war, the American progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism. Accordingly, leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as “right-wing” and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre-fascist thought.”
Anyone going through periodical archives of the 20s and 30s, anyone reading writers of that era, knows that both liberals and conservatives associated fascism with the right wing well before WWII. Travel books of the 1930s, for instance, listed the Nazi party under right wing political groups, as did liberal magazines like The New Yorker and conservative magazines like Time. It took no “liberal sleight of hand” to associate fascism with the right.
...It’s fascinating to observe, for instance, how Goldberg handles the knotty problem of Henry Ford:
“Hitler said he was a great admirer of Henry Ford, though he didn’t mention Ford’s virulent anti-Semitism. What appealed to Hitler about Ford was that he ‘produces for the masses. That little car of his has done more than anything else to destroy class differences.’”
This is practically the only mention of Ford you will find in this book, and it strongly implies that Hitler’s main attraction to Ford was not Ford’s bigotry, but the fact that Ford produced cars “for the masses.”
It was Ford’s anti-Semitism and his beliefs about the superiority of “Anglo-Saxons” that made him a hero to the Nazis, who bought up translations of his book The International Jew at a tremendous rate. It was also his anti-Communism and, in spite of all Hitler’s rhetoric about eliminating “class differences,” Ford’s disdain for the concept of equality. Ford believed that there was “no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal,” a philosophy that jibed quite well with Hitler’s belief that “men are not of equal value or of equal importance.”
Nor is there much talk about the Spanish Civil War, an odd omission in any discussion of 20th century fascism. (But then, the number of leftists and liberals who flocked to Spain to fight fascism well before the Second World War wouldn’t do much for Goldberg’s claims about that liberal plot to associate fascism with the right after WWII, would it?) Nor is there much about such Hitler supporters in Germany as Emil Kirdorf, an industrialist “so reactionary that he called the policies of the Imperial government ‘dangerously radical’” because it “had allowed Bismarck’s antisocialist law to lapse.” (From Who Financed Hitler, by James and Suzanne Pool) or steel heir Fritz Thyssen.
What Goldberg is doing here is juxtaposing the complex politics of the 20th century against the ignorance of many 21st century young people who have apparently gleaned their notions about the rise of fascism from skimming novels or half-watching movies about it while they blog on their laptops. Goldberg then declares this historical ignorance to be the fault of liberals out to fool us all and presents facts well known to anyone who’s bothered to read up on the subject as if they were carefully hidden secrets. At the same time, he carefully omits facts that indicate the more widespread popularity of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco among their contemporaries on the right.
I’d be delighted to discuss it with you at greater length-- I'd especially like to have a cozy chat about the connection between Jonah Goldberg's eagerness to revise history and his admiration for the bloodthirsty policies of mass murderer Augusto Pinochet.