John Hawkins interviews Jonah Goldberg about his book Liberal Fascism
which was at #1 on Amazon yesterday and now is sitting at #2.
which was at #1 on Amazon yesterday and now is sitting at #2.
posted by Helen at 5:52 AM
4 Comments:
Another great interview!
It's important to be aware of the warning signs of fascism.
I don't imagine you actually read the interview, so I'll post Goldberg's definition:
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.
Just for the record....
Funny, Jonah Goldberg was thoroughly and intelligently disembowled by David Neiwert in his review - point by point - to which Goldberg could not render even a satistfactorily whimpering rebuttal.
Check it out, you might learn something. It’s a fast read.
It’s not surprising that a political hack is embarassed again trying to be a historical revisionist. Even though the book doesn’t pass muster with intellectuals or historians, it is good enough for those it was intended for… the wingnuts, most of whom ‘ain’t too swift.’
The review starts with a little about the author:
“Most revisionists are actually historians with some credentials, and their theses often hinge on nuances and the interpretation of details.
Goldberg, who has no credentials beyond the right-wing nepotism that has enabled his career as a pundit, has drawn a kind of history in absurdly broad and comically wrongheaded strokes. It is not just history done badly, or mere revisionism. It’s a caricature of reality, like something from a comic-book alternative universe: Bizarro history.
and
"Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits — including, notably, Michelle Malkin’s attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter’s attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy’s reputation in her book Treason — in that it employs the same historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history."
Great reading for the weakminded looking to reinforce an agenda.
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