In Eager Anticipation

As I’ve said before, I have discovered the actual liberal-Communist-Fascist: U. S. Sen. Lundeen of Minnesota’s Farmer Labor Party, ancestral to the present liberal DFL, who was accused of being a Communist in 1934 (because he entered a bill providing for a race-blind social security system) and was accused of being a Nazi in 1941 (because he was an isolationist.)

He was a Spanish-American War veteran who also field-tested the M-1 rifle.

The link in the post is screwy. You should chop the first bit off.

rm post from banned commenter Lex/Dave

Ciarán: that was the whole point of the book, wasn’t it? Eliding the differences between liberalism, social democracy, communism, socialism and fascism to imply that all these share a common immoral impulse towards authoritarianism which his own supposedly Hayekian conservatism does not (ignoring the authoritarian abuses he endorses, but that’s by the by), but with enough hedging and “I’m not saying Liberals are Nazis, but…” to allow him to accuse a reader who calls him on it that they’re misinterpreting him.

“Squint and tell me if it looks like a swastika.” was always the name of the game, which is why the book is full of dumb shit like “The white male is the Jew of Liberal Fascism”. But Goldberg is well aware if he came right out with that, it’d be completely difficult to defend himself, so obviously stupid is the statement. So he blunders over his more wingnutty parts, obfusticates, and employs fuzzy definitions, not because, as some have said, he’s a shitty historian (though no doubt the man is not an AJP Taylor), but because it’s the only thing that makes his book look superficially unlike a foaming Bircher tract from the 50’s.

@6 and @8 but please understand my disappointment. I was hoping for at least a clever list of parallels along ‘Hitler built teh Autobahn; Bill Clinton was a Roads Scholar’ lines.

The only funny thing to come out of it was Andrew Marr mentioning that the book seemed to focus on Hilary Clinton, not Barack Obama. Goldberg had to formulate a reply that didn’t involve ‘I expected the draft-dodging lesbian to be running for President, not the black dude.’

I can imagine that it must be tempting to engage Goldberg for the sheer fun of it, but since he’s neither arguing in good faith, nor presenting a serious argument, I think it means doing him a favour more than anything else. All publicity is good publicity.

Hitler and Stalin wanted books to have points, too, you know. Mr. Goldberg proudly declines to go there.

Oh, of course! Burning them is more his thing, I suspect. In a proud, limited government kind of way which is IN NO WAY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY BAD THING. Obviously.

Huh. I noticed the blogspat about the BNP, but didn’t connect it with Jonah’s Magical Mystery Tour until now. Silly me.

Jonah spent almost the entire fiscal stimulus debate in London and Hawaii. It’s just possible that he doesn’t care about actual issues when polemicism is much more fun.

If there’s one thing you can say about Carl Schmitt, it’s definitely that he was wishy-washy and hippy-ish.

But I had thought that the definition – or at least the characteristics – of Fascism were rather noncontroversial:

1 Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2 Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
3 Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
4 Supremacy of the Military
5 Controlled Mass Media
6 Obsession with National Security
7 Religion and Government are Intertwined
8 Corporate Power is Protected
9 Labor Power is Suppressed
10 Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
11 Obsession with Crime and Punishment
12 Rampant Cronyism and Corruption

As I understand it, you don’t have to score a 12/12 before you can talk about a movement or state or what have as Fascist.

The controversy is in who to apply the label to, even when it clearly fits. Thus it’s perfectly okay to call ‘liberals’ Commies, or the more popular epithet, Socialists. But it’s not okay to call certain other groups Fascists.

Has the Doughy One’s book made enough of a splash to warrant discussing it, even for the purposes of ridicule, this late in the game?

In the history of publishing, perhaps.

ScentOfViolets

Not really.

3 is so common amongst political movements as to be anodyne. One might as well say ‘fascists live under the earth’s yellow sun

4 is untrue. Hitler hated the traditional military but was forced into alliance with them . The plans of Roehm for a people militia, devoid of Prussian cliques and aristocrats were popular within the wider movement and accorded with a long tradition of rhetoric. Mussolini had a similar attitude, needing the military, lacking the strenght to change it, but deeply suspicious of the whole institution. One more example, Pavelic abandoned the Home guard, the military formed out of the old Croatian element of the Yugoslav army, and looked instead to his party para-military formations in the Ustasa Militia.

5 is again so common as to be heuristically useless. For Jonah’s sake, lets consider the conservatives who controlled the media, Hindenburg, Pitt, the wartime governments of Asquith and Churchill.

6 again, not really a particular. One might say every state that has ever lasted more than a month (and ever a few that did not) has been obsessed by national security.

7 depends. The NSDAP and the PNF were quite clearly secular movements but the Falange, the Ustasa, the Iron Guard, the South Africa movements, the ZBOR and the OUN ultras were. Religion is used as a marker, dividing the ‘healthy’ volk from the ‘sick’. But that merely depends on the particulars of the movement’s rhetoric and circumstance

8 again depends. While in the case of the two most ‘successful’ movements, the NSDAP and the PNF, deals were made (indeed that might be the reason they were able to ‘conquer the state’, big business was very much at the beck and call of the new leadership. Further, other movements, such as the Guard in Romania and the Scythe Cross in Hungary were explicitly anti-capitalist, as in they saw the operation of industrialisation and commerce as unhealthy activities, undermining their precious volk. Lets not forget that big business continued to fund in the main the nationalist parties in Germany till 1932.

9 is common, but with fascism, it had its own reasons. Trade unions and labour power were an affront to the ‘majestic’ unity of the nation. Just as fascists hated the ‘establishment’ for being a nation within the real nation, so unions, with their ‘decadent’ psuedo-marxism and their materialism seemed to seperate rather than unify the ‘healthy’

10 is again untrue. Evola, one of the foremost thinkers in both Mussolini’s Italy and in the post war international fascist movements was his nation’s leading dadaist. Despite it’s presumed innocence from dealing with the Third Reich, Bauhaus architects continued to be commisioned until 1938. How else would one classify Junger or Heidigger or Gentile or Marinetti or Papini or Eliade but as intellectuals. Fascism hatred was reserved for what it preceived as decadent art or intellectual enquiry, a source of disruption and corruption in their shinny new world.

11 is the central plank of most governments since the 17th century. It is barely a fascist trait solely.

12 is a by product of disfunctional civic societies. The CCP manages to be both a horrifically repressive government, not fascist and eye wateringly corrupt at the same time. Remarkable stuff.

There is a fairly recent (last 20-15 years) definition of fascism that has far greater heuristic use. Building on the work of Mosse, Payne, Rogers Griffin and Eatwell and Emilio Gentile, this ‘new consensus’ has a remarkable power in evaluating the fascist movements in both ‘struggle’ and power. Fascism is thus a form of ultra-nationalism, that seeks to ‘save’ the nation from preceived collaspe and decadence by rebirth and political action. While it is easy to doubt, fascists considered themselves revolutionaries, breaking a temporal narrative of decline and regenerating the nation and it’s volk.

This is not of course to say Jonah is in the same parsec to the truth. Fascism, for several very good reasons, is most at home on the right of the political spectrum. The similarities he ‘discerns’ are merely the common ‘solutions’ of 20th centruy politics, taken up across the political spectrum, even those sainted and humble conservatives.

Shrug. You can dilute any component of that list by making the definition sufficiently exclusive, I suppose. And this list is hardly unique; I’ve seen dozens like it put forth by people of various pedigrees, some quite impressive. The flip side is that all these diagnostics seem to keep coming back to the same core concepts, however they are atomized or fused as items to be ticked off.

Not to say that you’re not right about a better formulation; on that I really couldn’t say. I’m just pointing out that there seems to be a certain degree of unity on what characterizes Fascism. Iow, it’s not just a label to be used as a club to beat opponents, like say, ‘activist judges’, or ‘liberal’.

Here’s Umberto Eco’s list of the elements of Fascism: click here.

‘The word Nazi was an acronym stemming from the German name for the National Socialist Party!’

When the movement was first founded, it was called the Nazi-Sozis or some such as in National and Socialist. After 1925, the Sozi was dropped and the nation part remained.

You could quarantine if the dope wasn’t providing content for newspapers television and radio. The more public abuse he gets the better because he’s simply awful at meeting it.