Letters to the Editor
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Goldberg Is A Useless Cheeto Gobbler
The Doughy Pantload's book is an intellectual farce. It will never be cited by any serious academic except as an example of how not to theorize about fascism.
It's just not a serious book -- not even intended to be, despite much Pantload posturing.
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Intellectual Ignorance and Dishonesty
Mr. Goldberg seems to be missing a basic truth -- all ideologies (socialism, fascism, whatever) are belief systems used to frame our understanding of political thought. They are not sets of actions that one can reliably associate with one political wing over another one. Each can justify the exact same acts. The difference is philosophical and ideological -- that is, WHY people do what they do. Taking that into account Fascism is CLEARLY Right-wing just as Socialism is CLEARLY Left-wing.
Just look at the ideology. A basic tenet of Left-wing ideas is that individuality is something that needs to be nurtured and protected by the group at large (e.g. in practice, government). At an EXTREME such as Soviet style socialism this idea sours into a stiffling sameness where individual exceptionalism is see as offensive to the greater good.
On the flip side the Right-wing attitude tends to be that individuality is something that must be earned through accomplishment and living up to social expectations. Again, taken to an EXTREME as in Nazi-style Fascism you get a particularly cruel sort of Social Darwinism where individual rights and power come only through loyalty to the oppressive social order and/or through brute political/military strength.
To be it another way, Soviet Socialism said "We are in this together, so no one is allowed to be different" whereas Nazi Fascism said "Only the strong survive -- if you want something then take it." Both represent extreme and dysfunctional manifestations of Left-wing and Right-wing philosophies, respectively.
Jonah Goldberg's basic failing is that he effectively places all "evil" acts with the left and all "good" with the Right, forgetting that Right/Left are actually political philosophies, not codes of behavior. He is being intellectually lazy and ignorant (if not dishonest) for apparently failing to see this basic distinction
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Stalingrad - Kursk Etc.
Soviet troops smashed the Wehermacht in Russia and paid the heaviest price in civilian and military casualties compared to any nation on the planet. They essentially won the western theatre of the World War.
A Soviet (and Jewish) newspaperman, Vassily Grossman, was the first newsman in Treblinka. His heart-rending document on that place was later read into the record at Nuremberg.
In China, troops of the Chinese Red Army fought the Japanese fascists for many years, even before the "world" war started, and actually took on the most Japanese troops of any country.
Not to mention every 'liberal' enlisting in the U.S. army for that war.
Now we are supposed to believe that the people that destroyed the fascists, are the same as the fascists. Unfortunately for Goldberg, history cannot be re-written.
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Fascism is but one form of totalitarianism.
If Goldberg had written a book that simply examined the spectrum of totalitarianism from the right to the left it really wouldn't matter. But like Coulter, he's not a political scientist or an historian (or even a very good writer), but a partisan hack hoping to further muddy the ideological waters in America. He no more believes that American liberalism is a descendant of fascism than does Coulter or the any of the rest of the epithet prone of the right. That's not the point. His book and Coulter's are aimed at the "dead-enders," the 30% or so of not so thoughtful Americans that still believe Iraq was involved with the 9/11 attacks, that they invasion was justified, and that Shrub is the one of the best presidents in American history.
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Made me glad to be a subscriber
This interview is outstanding - I find Golberg's thesis really aggravating and insulting, but that doesn't mean I want him to be insulted or provoked when interviewed. A good interview asks hard questions and listens to the answers. This interview waited two pages before getting to the harder questions, which meant that Goldberg was comfortable enough to give thoughtful answers. Just because I disagree with him doesn't mean I don't want to hear what he has to say; that would be the Republican way of discourse, and I'm not a Republican.
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I'm Convinced...
Yep...he's right. Liberals are facists -- if soft facists.
Fortunately, Mr. Goldberg's party and its leaders are fighting against such evil. They seem to know that they can't do it under the Constitution but with the help of torture, domestic spying, abandonment of habeus corpus, etc. they'll be able to save the republic.
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And the house of cards collapses.....
From Goldberg's own mouth:
...There's no such thing as a society undergoing a bout of ultra-nationalism that remains a liberal free-market economy. The two things go together...
And who since WWII have consistently been the "My country, right or wrong"; "God bless AMERICA"; "Dissent gives aid and comfort to the enemy" ultra-nationalists?
Hint: It wasn't the hippies that faked (or bought into the fakery) of the Gulf of Tonkin 'incident'.
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But the basic premise is a LIE!
Goldberg is correct in stating that his is a work of historical revisionism. But his strain is of the worst kind, because what he state is simply not true and people don't have to look any further than Mussolini's own words to see this.
Yes, Mussolini was a Socialist before WWI, but he broke with the Socialists because their platform on the war was one of pacifism. And by the time fascism was rising to power in the 20's Mussolini called fascism "the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism".
Politically his views were rightist, he called modern leftist ideology the "absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism, the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress". Also, fascism in part came to power as a reactionary force opposed to Communism.
About free enterprise Mussolini had this to say: "[t]he corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation."
I could go on an on, but as you can plainly see if he was alive today and lived in America he would definitely be voting Republican.