Liberal Fascism (1) – Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **
Uploaded by TylerNull on Feb 17, 2008
PLAYLIST: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C20E954A7632DCFD
Jonah Goldberg discusses his new book, “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning”, at The Heritage Foundation on C-SPAN2. 09 JAN 08.
Below is a portion of the blog post Interviewing Jonah Goldberg About His New Book, Liberal Fascism by John Hawkins. I thought you would enjoy it:
Yesterday, I interviewed Jonah Goldberg about his new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
What follows is a slightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Before we really get started, give us the Jonah Goldberg definition of fascism.
A short definition would simply be — there’s a longer definition in the book — it’s one word we give for a totalitarian, religious impulse, where everything has to go together, where the state has to govern every aspect of society or at least direct every aspect of society towards some Utopian end. Something like that. It’s a hard thing to (define) which is why it’s important to define it better on paper, which I do in the book.
I think one of the things we get caught up with, when we talk about fascism, is that we think it is this incredibly unique thing and really, it’s just another name for a kind of socialism. Fascism is socialism, Mussolini was a socialist, the National Socialists — duh — were socialists.
Instead, what we’ve done is turn fascism into this shorthand for evil. Nazism was obviously evil and Italian fascism was really, really bad, but fascism meant something else as well.
…Take the word socialism. More people were rounded up, put in camps, and murdered in the name of socialism than were ever killed in the name of Nazism or fascism and that’s not even counting the National Socialists of Germany. Mao killed 65 million people in the name of socialism. Stalin killed, minimum, 20 million people in the name of socialism. But, if I call you a socialist, that’s like I’m saying you’re misguided, Utopian, idealistic, or goofy, but it doesn’t mean I am calling you a genocidal murderer. But, we do that with fascism, where we just say it’s sort of a codeword for evil. So, part of the book explains that fascism isn’t as exotic as you think it is, it’s really just a flowering of a different kind of socialism.
Liberal Fascism (2) – Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **
Uploaded by TylerNull on Feb 17, 2008
PLAYLIST: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C20E954A7632DCFD
Jonah Goldberg discusses his new book, “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning”, at The Heritage Foundation on C-SPAN2. 09 JAN 08.
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One of the common arguments you see on the net between conservatives and liberals is whether the Nazis were creatures of the Left or Right. What do you say?
I say, they were indisputably a phenomenon of the Left. Now, that said, they certainly talked about themselves in ways, that to the ear of a person living in 2008, sounds confusing.
Mussolini referred to himself as being on the Right…but what he meant by Right, was a right-wing socialist. You have to remember, Stalin was calling Trotsky a right-winger back in those days. Bukharin was put in one of Stalin’s show trials for being a Right-Wing deviationist. He was a hard core left-wing socialist.
Beyond that, if you were a Martian and you came to planet Earth with a clipboard and you observed politics and history, and you defined the Left as statism, collectivism, hostility to classical liberalism, hostility to traditional Christianity and tradition generally and you defined the Right, at least in the Anglo-American sense, as both traditionalism and limited government — right? I mean to me, that seems to be a pretty good anatomical description of Left and Right.
I have never, ever, ever heard anybody make a credible argument that by those standards, Nazism wasn’t on the Left. It’s obviously so. I think we get too caught up in intellectual labels and buzzwords when it’s obvious, if you step back from the painting far enough, where on the canvas the Nazis belong.Well, if someone said to you, “Jonah, I’m not sure I buy that, so give me some of the most striking similarities between modern liberals and Fascists like Hitler and Mussolini,” what would you tell them?
Well, I want to be careful and say up front…
I understand they’re not Hitler…we’re not comparing Hillary to Goering…
Right. I am not playing the game that the Left does.
That said, where to start…putting aside the stuff like, they’re socialists, Hitler is lured into the German Worker’s Party by a speech called, “By What Means Shall Capitalism Be Destroyed,” putting aside the Nazi Party platform of 1920, which Adolph Hitler co-writes, which includes socialized medicine, universal health care, universal education, guaranteed wages, appropriation of the wealth of the rich, an “Anti- Wal Mart” plank essentially, where they go after big department stores, putting aside all of the obvious economic similarities, there is also the populism. The Nazis insisted on speaking out for the little guy, what FDR called the “forgotten man.” At any rally, if there was ever going to be an aristocrat or a wealthy person on the stage or anywhere near it, they insisted on having at least one peasant farmer or factory hand on the stage, too. They were deeply populist, plus there are philosophical similarities which we still have.
One of the central points of fascism is the cult of unity. This idea that — and this is what I was getting at in the beginning with my definition of fascism — that if everybody gets together, if everybody holds hands and agrees to the national program, to the progressive cause, to what the movement dictates is right and good, then we will be able to be delivered from history, we will be delivered to a promised land, a Thousand Year Reich, a Communist world, a perfect society, a utopia, the kingdom of heaven on earth — that notion still runs straight through the heart of contemporary liberalism today.
Barack Obama says on the stump that we can create a kingdom of heaven on earth. Hillary Clinton talks about how, if we can just create this idealized village of hers, that everyone will feel like they belong, everything will be in the village, nothing outside of the village. When Barack Obama is on the stump, his whole point is that if we can just be unified, public policy issues don’t really matter, what really matters is unity — that sort of thing.
There’s also a sort of contempt for Democratic values that also comes out of this unity thing. One of the most fascistic things that kids on college campuses say is that, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” In other words, there is no safe harbor. Either you agree with where the movement wants to go or you are a problem and problems need to be solved by definition.
You hear Al Gore say the time for discussion is over. You hear Hillary Clinton say constantly, we need to move beyond our ideological disagreements, beyond our partisan disagreements, beyond political labels — and the thing is, in 15 years in conservative punditry I have never heard someone say, “I don’t believe in labels, I think we need to move beyond our ideological differences, and therefore I am going to abandon everything I believe and agree with you, for the sake of unity.” People only say we need to move beyond ideology, we need to put partisanship aside, or the time for discussion is over, when they want to tell you to shut up and get with their program. That is a fundamentally undemocratic, quasi-fascistic way of talking about politics.
…A lot of people get confused about how fascism was supposed to be militarism and militaristic, well, there’s a lot of truth to that obviously, but I think they misunderstand the point of militarism to a certain extent. What fascinated progressives and fascists alike about militarism was that it provided a means of mobilizing society. One of the central aspects of fascism is the need to create crisis, so that everyone drops their opposition to any program and rallies around the state in unity. That’s what militarism was useful for. Now, I flatly concede that today’s liberals are not militaristic in the slightest, but they are still calling for moral equivalents of war…they want to call for a war on poverty, a war on inequality, the war on cancer…
The Daily Hatch 