A review copy of Liberal Fascism: A Very Serious Argument That Has Never Been Made With Such Care or in Such Detail showed up in the mail today. Unfortunately, Spencer Ackerman nabbed it and ran off somewhere. But soon enough, it shall be mine....
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All I Want for Christmas
24 Dec 2007 05:09 pm
Comments (40)
Scooped!
Since Jonah asserts that the white male is the Jew of liberal fascism, don't forget to warn us white boys when to report to the train station for deportation to the camps. Until then, I'll be busy sewing the Bob Dobbs armbands onto my shirts and jackets.
be sure to send sully the excerpts on how the Nazi's treated homosexuality. Golberg borders on Holocaust denial. He's like David Irving, only without the talent, brains, or skill.
Takes a certain kind of mind to look forward reading that, I guess.
What the fuck is the "Politics of Meaning" anyways?
Say what you want about Jonah's arguments - the man knows how to create a buzz.
I suppose it's non-PC in some way to suggest this, but if, let's say, Bill had never met Monica, would we ever have heard of Lucianne Goldberg? And if not, would Jonah have been plucked from the Womb of Obscurity to bother us with this now? Maybe his career was already in the pipeline prior to '98. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Hipper minds than mine can probably answer that.
Conservative Stalinism: The Secret History of the American Right, From Roy Cohn to the Neo-Cons
“Stalinists,” “Commies,” “elitist commissars”—such are the insults typically hurled at liberals by their conservative opponents. Calling someone a Stalinist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real Stalinists in our midst?
Conservative Stalinism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define Stalinist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, JB reminds us that the original Stalinists were really on the right, and that conservatives from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Stalin's Bolsheviks.
Contrary to what most people think, the Stalinists were ardent conservatives. They believed in runaway military spending and in labeling their domestic opponents weak-willed traitors. They advocated submission to government authority and spent vast sums fighting anti-democratic movements in Spain and Germany. They presided over a revival of old-fashioned patriotism during the aptly-named "Great Patriotic War." The Stalinists declared war on drugs, supported the death penalty, warantless searches, and torture. They loathed disorder, provided generous hand-outs to their political allies, and marginalized liberal professors in their universities. The Stalinists led the world in opposing the rise of (national) socialism. Nikolai Yezhov tried enemies of the state without allowing them to see the evidence against them, and Stalin himself preemptively occupied Eastern Europe to guard against a resurgence of Germano-fascism.
Do these striking parallels mean that today’s conservatives are militaristic maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new ideological order? Uh... not at all! Yet it is hard to deny that modern conservativim and classical Stalinism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Stalin had many admirers in the United States. Richard Nixon betrayed Taiwan in favor of Maoist China, and Jeane Kirkpatrick was a member of the Young People's Socialist League. David Horowitz's parents were ardent Stalinists. Many Stalinist tenets, including price controls and official "enemies lists," were incorporated into Nixon's domestic policy agenda.
Stalinism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Russia, Stalinism appeared as genocidal collectivist radicalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more conservative form. The modern heirs of this “friendly Stalinist” tradition include the Weekly Standard, the Republican Party, the conservative think tanks, and the hosts of talk radio. The quintessential Conservative Stalinist isn't an NKVD murderer; it is an East Coast pundit at the Heritage Foundation or National Review.
These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what Stalinism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, JB turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Conservative Stalinism.
Well done, JB.
Bravo, JB! I tried my hand at satirizing the un-satirizable here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/22/181550/04/510/425631
And I call it un-satirizable because it is hard to believe that anyone would try to make the arguments the Doughy Pantload is making with a straight face. Or that anyone would actually pay him to write shit like that.
I think I'll write a book entitled, "Jesus Was a Nazi and Reagan was a Fag Commie," since it seems all you need to do these days is come up with something so outrageously false and ridiculous that it creates "buzz." I'll be on Meet the Press in no time! No one will kick me out of polite society, either, because I went to Yale and know friends of friends.
Then I'll join Sarah Silverman on tour and do a shtick on "negro faggots" -- in an ironic, "is he racist or just clever?" sort of way. I'll be the next Ann Coulter in no time!
I think I'll write a book entitled, "Jesus Was a Nazi and Reagan was a Fag Commie"...Then I'll join Sarah Silverman on tour and do a shtick on "negro faggots" -- in an ironic, "is he racist or just clever?" sort of way.
Too late. You've already blown your hand by revealing your intentions in your comment. A key qualification for contrarian-celebrityhood is that the candidate must never, ever, ever admit to not being wholeheartedly sincere in one's loopy views.
From the Amazon blurb: "We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States.
Just so. In fact I seem to recall a certain grandfather of a certain president that did business with the nazis well into WWII. I also have some vague recollection of a certain US political party integrating former nazi officials into their political machinery shortly after after the war.
A Different Matt -- Jonah isn't creating a buzz... sadly, we're doing it for him. But it's a 'Britney buzz'... he's done something so astoundingly stupid that it's almost impossible not to pass comment on it.
JB: another for your list: compare Lysenkoism to intelligent design.
You mean like the Harrimans, Rockefellers, Kennedys et al; is Robert Kennedy's Jr's name
tarnished by Joe Kennedy's sins. Is JayRockefeller
to wear sack cloth and ashe, for Standard Oil & Chase Manhattan's business dealings in Germany. The Forrestals, the Lovetts, have all receded into history, but you get the point. On the other
point, the search for intelligence operatives and information on the Soviets led in odd directions;
the Gehlen Org being just a small part of them.
Re: Maybe his career was already in the pipeline prior to '98.
It was. While not well known to the general public before Monica, Lucianne Goldberg was a doyenne of the GOP going back to Nixon's day. Half the Right owed her favors or was afraid of the scandals she could reveal about them. She certainly had enough pull to get Jonah on the National Review staff.
"Re: Maybe his career was already in the pipeline prior to '98.
It was. While not well known to the general public before Monica, Lucianne Goldberg was a doyenne of the GOP going back to Nixon's day. Half the Right owed her favors or was afraid of the scandals she could reveal about them. She certainly had enough pull to get Jonah on the National Review staff."
Thank you, JonF. I surmised as much. I will say the guy has a certain kind of smarts. Too bad they're so warped. I guess we can credit La Lucianne for that. Sorry, Jonah, for doing dozens on your mom.
It sounds like you and your housemate have to have a very serious, thoughtful, argument that you've never had before in such detail or with such care.
Golberg borders on Holocaust denial. He's like David Irving, only without the talent, brains, or skill.No "borders" about it. Goldberg is a Holocaust denier, clear as they come.
It's hard to blame Jonah for this mess. He spent so much of his childhood strapped to a table in the Green Kitchen, being forced to listen to Saint Reagan's speeches and radio shows over and over again while his mom used him for her bizarre experiments with hoses and ice water and hot sauce. To this day he's afraid to say no to her - he hears her snarls of "Dirty Boy!" and "Filthy Bastard!" and "Nasty, Naughty Animal!" even in his sleep.
JB, that was awesome.
Best comments thread I've read in a good while.
The Netroots obsession with morons such as Klein, Broder and Goldberg is an enigma. Who cares what morons say? Way too much energy and expensive space is wasted with zero added value.
"A key qualification for contrarian-celebrityhood is that the candidate must never, ever, ever admit to not being wholeheartedly sincere in one's loopy views."
I'm in!
Even Zod will have to kneel before me!
Re: Goldberg is a Holocaust denier
Can you document this? I have never read anything by the guy that bordered on Holocaust denial. Moreover, he is of Jewish descent through his father (Lucianne is a gentile I believe though I could be wrong about that). While I often disagreed with Goldberg I used to like to read him. Nowadays, not so much. Like most or the Right he had the choice of sinking with Bush or swimming tosafety, and like most of them he has chosen to sink, deeper and deeper into the fever swamps.
Actual Jonah Goldberg statement: "The white man is the Jew of liberal fascism."
Fact: White men are not being transported to the ovens in boxcars under the "liberal-fascist regime."
Ergo: Jonah does not believe that Jews were transported to the ovens in boxcars in the "German liberal-fascist regime" better known as Nazi Germany.
Seems easy to prove that the Doughy Pantload is a Holocaust denier to me.
That was my copy!
calipygian--The line about the white man, while reprehensible, doesn't really constitute denial, as not all forms of fascism involved extermination camps. The bit about the Nazis not really targeting homosexuals, however, really does come close to the relativizing logic I've heard people use. (A colleague once made reference to a prominent Jewish professor in Berlin who supposedly worked relatively unmolested into the 1940s and looked at me as if to say, "see?". This is similar to what Jonah is doing by pointing to prominent Nazis known to be gay and suggesting that gay people weren't persecuting, targeting for extermination, and murdered. That's the argument that struck me as crossing a line.)
Anthony Cantor - I fully agree that not all forms of fascism involved extermination camps. After all, while sometimes suffering pograms (but not extermination) in certain countries before World War II (I have in mind pre-War Poland), it is a fact that racially based extermination is not a feature of most Fascist regimes (I have in mind Portugal, Spain and especially Italy). By specifically using the example of the Jew, Jonah is explicitly making the link between the group that everyone knows suffered under Fascism (the Jews) and the Fascist regime that purpotrated the worst crimes against them (the Nazi regime) and using that link to pathetically attempt to score a very cheap political point. By degrading the treatment that the Jews suffered under the Nazi regime to that allegedly suffered by the white man in present day America, he is saying that the white man had it as bad as the Jew in Nazi Germany. If A=B, then it follows that B=A, I.E. the Jews had it as bad in Nazi Germany as the white man has in 21st century America.
If that isn't Holocaust denial, I don't know what is. It's despicable and he needs to apologize for the anti-Semitism implicit in his statement.
Anthony Cantor - As for the Nazi's not targeting homosexuals, I guess the Doughy Pantload doesn't even address the Night of the Long Knives.
The Netroots obsession with morons such as Klein, Broder and Goldberg is an enigma. Who cares what morons say? Way too much energy and expensive space is wasted with zero added value.
Every one of those has an influential major-media print venue where he can express misinformed, thoughtless, dishonest point of view. We obsess about them because they're important in the real world. 60-80% of the electorate gets their opinions from people as bad or worse than they are (add Coulter, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Beck, Boortz, and Savage for the "worse than"). So we can't ignore them. Often the well-informed blogosphere is virtually unanimous about a question when 60-80% of the electorate believes the exact opposite. That's the world we live in, and we can't forget that.
In the case of Klein, Broder, and Golderg, they've all shown enough faint signs of intelligence and self-respect that some people hope that the three of them might be shamed into correcting their stupidities. For various reasons, I think that this is wrong -- Broder barely remembers what decade he's in, malicious, ingenious anti-liberal "contrarianism" is all Klein has to sell, and the bonds of omerta will always prevent Goldberg from leaving the criminal conspiracy he was born into.
I wonder how the hispanic (or hell, just the general) readership of the LA Times would feel about this insidiously bigoted and oh-so-smarmy blurb Goldberg wrote yesterday about the 'atrocity' of fake christmas trees.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDM0NjI1ZTllMmYxMmIyYjYxZmRkMTJmMjgxYjU2NTI=
The bit about the Nazis not really targeting homosexuals, however, really does come close to the relativizing logic I've heard people use. (A colleague once made reference to a prominent Jewish professor in Berlin who supposedly worked relatively unmolested into the 1940s and looked at me as if to say, "see?". This is similar to what Jonah is doing by pointing to prominent Nazis known to be gay and suggesting that gay people weren't persecuting, targeting for extermination, and murdered. That's the argument that struck me as crossing a line.)Bingo!
Denying that the Nazis targeted homosexuals for extermination is no more or less ahistorical and reprehensible than denying that they thusly targeted Jews or Gypsies. Jonah's written a book that should make him leery of traveling to any country where Holocaust denial is a crime, but that will probably also make him an even more insufferable self-proclaimed martyr when it gets banned in such places.
calipygian--you're right. Good point. Wow, it's worse than I thought.
"This is similar to what Jonah is doing by pointing to prominent Nazis known to be gay and suggesting that gay people weren't persecuting, targeting for extermination, and murdered."
I hope it is clear that I meant that gay people were persecutED, targetED for extermination, and murdered. Sorry about that.
Re: 60-80% of the electorate gets their opinions from people as bad or worse than they are
I'd put the number at maybe half that: the fraction of the electorate that is already in the rightwing camp or has its tents pitched close by and at the same time bothers to read newspaper editorial pages (where you can also encounter Dowd, Krugman, et al), or NRO and similar partisan organs on line. Most people, I think, don't do that, and pay very little to the punditocracy. They get their news mainly from local TV and perhaps from the news section of the local paper. The punditocracy, left and right both, is far less influential than it likes to think it is.
Don't see your point, JonF. Most TV news people and TV talking heads are as bad as or worse than Klein and Broder, at least, most people on talk radio are worse than all three of them, and Dowd is as bad as Broder. In the big media, Krugman and Olberman are very rare exceptions, and both were probably hired by mistake. A very high proportion of the people in this country go through their lives without ever hearing a liberal Democratic point of view. The problem isn't just the far right; Broder and Klein define the mushy, anti-Democratic middle.
The internet bubble is a very good place to get political information -- for me it's replaced everything else, though I really should read more books -- but it's a very, very poor place to study American public opinion or the dynamics of the American opinion-making process.
Ouch!
Anthony Cantor said, ""This is similar to what Jonah is doing by pointing to prominent Nazis known to be gay and suggesting that gay people weren't persecuting, targeting for extermination, and murdered."
Exactly. It would be like a future historian looking back at today's Republicans and saying that they didn't constantly foment resentment against gays because Larry Craig was publicly gay and they didn't kick him out of the Senate.
Actually my analogy would be a lot tighter if instead of "historian" I had said "hack magazine writer".
Comments closed January 07, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
We expect a full length evisceration.
Posted by otto | December 24, 2007 5:24 PM