Liberal Fascism - an American Kulturkampf
Sunday, March 30th, 2008“There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.”
I just finished reading Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. Throughout this phenomenal book, I kept thinking of the above quote. When I finally experienced my “awakening”, I was shocked at the quantity and depth of Liberal propaganda that is believed by the masses. I wrote about five of these myths in my blog “Lies From the Land of the Left”. The first lefty lie I discussed was the myth that Hitler belongs on the right side of the political spectrum. Jonah Goldberg has dedicated his book to systematically dismantling the belief that fascists are “right wing” (please also see the outstanding video on my home page “Overview of America” - which exposes this lie as well). In his book, Goldberg “replaces conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research. He reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism and Mussolini’s Fascism.”
Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence their political party “National Socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They declared themselves enemies of capitalism and the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler (Hitler’s right hand man who oversaw the concentration camps and coordinated and implemented the killing of approximately six million Jews) was an extreme animal rights activist.
Some other interesting quotes from the book (with my commentary thrown in):
* Fascism is and always has been a phenomenon of the left. This fact – and inconvenient truth is there ever was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space. The fact that they appear as polar opposites is a trick of intellectual history and the result of a concerted propaganda effort on the part of the “Reds” to make the “Browns” appear objectively evil and “other” (ironically, demonization of the “other” is counted as a definitional trait of fascism). But in terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.
* In the Liberal telling of America’s story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and “America” writ large. They have repeatedly censored and rewritten history so that the “bad guys” were always conservatives and the good guys always liberals. Progressives, or modern Liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. Example: DEMOCRAT (I don’t hide the “D”) President Woodrow Wilson’s Sedition Act banned “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or the military”. The act also allowed the Postmaster General to deny mail delivery to dissenters of government policy during wartime. Imagine a Republican President trying that… say Reagan or Bush? Pffft.
* Liberals try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend “nontraditional belief”. Fascism, like Progressivism and Communism, is expansionist because it sees no natural boundary to its ambitions. For violent variations, like Islamofascism, this is transparently obvious. But Progressivism, too, envisions a New World Order. Fascism is a religion of the state. The liberals quest to create an all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing state, a state that assumes responsibility for every desirable outcome and takes the blame for every setback on the road to utopia, a state that finally replaces God.
* In contrast, the conservative vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life. All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment – John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke – none of them have any direct link intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part Pragmatism. Meanwhile, the ranks of left-wing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. Deconstructionism, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all of these ideas have the same purpose – to erode tradition and dissolve the concrete foundations of TRUTH.
* Liberals have fallen in love with the idea behind the racial welfare state. They’ve absorbed the Marxist and fascist conception of “the system” as racist and corrupt and therefore in constant need of state intervention. In particular, as Shelby Steele notes, they’ve convinced themselves that support for such programs is proof of their own moral worth. Blacks were “grateful” to white liberals; therefore, white liberals aren’t racist. Whites who oppose the racial spoils system are racist. Blacks who oppose it are self-hating race traitors. Liberalism has become a soft totalitarianism and multiculturalism the mechanism for a liberal Gleichschaltung. If you fall outside the liberal consensus, you are either evil or an abettor of evil. This is the logic of the Volks-gemeinschaft in politically correct jargon.
* Back to Hitler, I discussed in my previous blog that although he was baptized Catholic as an infant, he renounced Christianity and was a self proclaimed atheist. Hitler stated “The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. The German race has existed without Christianity for thousands of years, and will continue after Christianity has disappeared.” In 1935, he abolished mandatory prayer in school and in 1938 carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely. By 1941, religious instruction for children fourteen years and up was abolished altogether. This does not sound like a Christian right-wing leader, it sounds like a member of the ACLU (aka: a “D”). As Jeremy Rabkin has argued, the school prayer decisions of the 1960s should be seen as the beginning of the Supreme Court’s role as the primary engine of the American Kulturkampf.
Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, the left in our country have created whole postmodern cosmologies to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or “natural” categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed (as the line goes: “So Dark, the Con of Man”). The left in our country have done an insane job of twisting/reversing the facts. The principles, passions and arguments of Liberal fascism have troubling echoes to Nazism. We need to speak up and expose the lies that they are indoctrinating through the MSM, Hollywood and especially our educational system. As Abraham Lincoln warned: “The philosophy of the classroom today will be the philosophy of the government tomorrow.”
Overview of America (Don’t Die without seeing this video.)
Currently reading :
South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias
By Brian C. Anderson
Release date: By 25 April, 2005
