Someone please explain how I can get a job as a columnist for a major newspaper.
I guarantee that no matter how badly I do I will never write the sort of ghastly risible utter tripe that appears to be in the new book by the LA Times's latest addition to its pundit stable. See Sadly, No! for a sneek peek at Jonah Goldberg's “Liberal Fascism”.
You’d hate it. Being a columnist is about generating readers, not being correct.
Bret
Goldberg misses the main distinctive features of fascism that has made it an utterly despised creed: starting wars and murder of political opponents.
The actual ideological content of fascism, such as it is, is pretty incoherent. Hitler was not a deep philosophical thinker and took most of his ideas from popular editions of the well known philosophers of the day. His one real original idea was the idea of starting a war with the objective of eliminating the population of Poland and re-settling it with Germans. And it was only original insofar as pretty much everyone else would have thought the idea of war shattered Germany suceeding in doing so was utterly idiotic.
Hitler’s other big idea, murdering millions of Jews, Gypsies and political opponents was not exactly new but he was the first to set up a factory system for intentional murder on that scale.
Lets see, of the political ideologies out there at the moment which of them has demonstrated a predisposition for starting wars with the scarcely concealed ulterior goal of capturing the resources belonging to another people? That would be George W Bush’s Republican party in Iraq and the Goldberg’s Likudnik friends who spend their time talking about ‘transfer’. What are the settlements in Gaza and the West Bank if not an attempt to establish Liebensraum for the Jewish Volk?
There isn’t exactly a political ideology that favors factory system murder at this point but there is a party in the US that has set about systematically eliminating the constitutional checks and balances designed to prevent that type of outcome. Again, its the party that Goldberg favors.
“[G]hastly risible utter tripe”….. Wow! That’s certainly quite a little tirade in order to disparage a book you’ve never even read. Defensive much?
The hysteria from lefty blogs over this book certainly raises some eyebrows. Its almost as if Goldberg has struck some sort of nerve.
And as much as Im sure it pains you and your readers to hear, comparisons between the darling of modern-day liberalism FDR – and fascism cannot be dismissed out-of-hand. Putting aside his internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans, it was FDR who established the Orwellian Office of Censorship and it was FDR who flirted with usurping an unfriendly judiciary with his Judiciary Reorganization Bill. Unfortunately, the list goes on…..and on……and on.
FDR, like Hitler and Mussolini, were collectivists in the worst sense of the word. To be fair, FDR never took things as far as his German and Italian counterparts, but there are striking similarities in their views on government. All three were vehemently opposed to individualism, free markets, and decentralized power. FDR himself called Mussolini admirable. Thankfully for the U.S., FDR never enjoyed the luxury of a one-party state.
And to commenter PHB:
Your knowledge (or lack thereof) of basic history is a bit frightening. The right has some sort of “predisposition for starting wars…”?….WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Clintonian air-campaign adventure in the Balkans…any of these ring a bell?
And I hate to rain on your anti-“Zionist” parade, but there are no longer any Jewish settlements in Gaza. Back in August 2005, Israel unilaterally removed all Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip and several others in the West Bank. Those Israelis that refused to voluntarily vacate their homes were evicted by Israeli security forces. Hardly the actions of an “occupying force”, eh?
All the Israelis got for their trouble was to create a closer staging area for terrorists to launch rockets and suicide attacks into Israel.
Heh. Any book that contains the following sentence is ghastly risible utter tripe in my book: “The quintessential Liberal Fascist isnt an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.”
Lets see, Hitler was a right winger and he started WWII, the Kaiser was also a rightist and he started WWI. But I was actually referring to the current political parties rather than the parties in 1940 or 50.
Bush is not the first President to like starting wars but he is the first to have shown such transparent delight at the idea of executions and torture. I suspect its a sexual thing with him rather than an ideological commitment. But that hardly explains why the right is so keen to back him on this.
If we are going to adopt the Goldberg mode of discourse we may conclude that Republicans are the party of serial killers on the basis that Ted Bundy was a young Republican or that Republicans are pedohiles and perverts like Foley and Larry Craig or that Republicans are corrupt like Ted Stephens, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramhof, Cunningham, Doolittle, Ney.