http://www.spectator.co.uk/2009/02/liberals-are-the-true-heirs-of-the-nazi-spirit/
Liberals are the true heirs of the Nazi spirit
What Goldberg very effectively does is to remove from the charge sheet the one possible reason any thinking person could have for not wanting to be right-wing: viz, that being on the right automatically makes you a closet fascist/Nazi scumbag. By accumulating a mass of historical evidence so extensive it borders on the wearisome, Goldberg comprehensively demonstrates that both Nazism and fascism were phenomena of the Left, not of the Right.
The book, a New York Times No. 1 bestseller has, needless to say, enraged lefties (‘liberals’ as they’re more usually known in the States) everywhere. ‘In the first week I had half a dozen emails from total strangers saying, “How dare you accuse us caring liberals of being fascists!” and then going on to say what a shame it was that my family hadn’t been sorted out once and for all a few years back in the concentration camps,’ he says.
Nazism and fascism, it turned out, were closer kindred spirits of Soviet communism than he could ever have imagined. The first expressed itself through ideas about racial purity and Jew-hatred, the second with ideas about the primacy of the nation, but in most other respects they were all remarkably similar: seizing the means of production; empowering the masses; rule by experts; the elevation of youth and brute emotion over wisdom, tradition and intellect; the submission of the individual to the will of the state. As Goldberg wryly puts it, ‘The Nazis were not big on property rights and tax cuts.’
Goldberg points out that it was liberals — not conservatives — who were the biggest advocates of eugenics; that America’s most racist (and fascistic) president was the arch-liberal Woodrow Wilson; and that during the supposedly wondrous New Deal of the beloved liberal president FDR, an immigrant dry-cleaner could have his door kicked in and be imprisoned for cleaning suits for five cents less than the agreed government minimum, while Nuremberg-style rallies — prompting a visiting British Independent Labour MP to complain it all felt far too much like Nazi Germany — were staged in New York.
Goldberg’s purpose is not to argue that liberals are bad people, still less that they’re all closet fascists. But he does want them to realise that people in glass houses are scarcely in the ideal position to throw stones. ‘I’m not a big believer in guilt by association. But their lack of self-awareness about the demons in their own midst is really astounding.’
But then, he argues, the problem with liberals is that they’ve always been so convinced of their moral righteousness that they never feel the need to analyse their position too deeply.
Liberals are the true heirs of the Nazi spirit
What Goldberg very effectively does is to remove from the charge sheet the one possible reason any thinking person could have for not wanting to be right-wing: viz, that being on the right automatically makes you a closet fascist/Nazi scumbag. By accumulating a mass of historical evidence so extensive it borders on the wearisome, Goldberg comprehensively demonstrates that both Nazism and fascism were phenomena of the Left, not of the Right.
The book, a New York Times No. 1 bestseller has, needless to say, enraged lefties (‘liberals’ as they’re more usually known in the States) everywhere. ‘In the first week I had half a dozen emails from total strangers saying, “How dare you accuse us caring liberals of being fascists!” and then going on to say what a shame it was that my family hadn’t been sorted out once and for all a few years back in the concentration camps,’ he says.
Nazism and fascism, it turned out, were closer kindred spirits of Soviet communism than he could ever have imagined. The first expressed itself through ideas about racial purity and Jew-hatred, the second with ideas about the primacy of the nation, but in most other respects they were all remarkably similar: seizing the means of production; empowering the masses; rule by experts; the elevation of youth and brute emotion over wisdom, tradition and intellect; the submission of the individual to the will of the state. As Goldberg wryly puts it, ‘The Nazis were not big on property rights and tax cuts.’
Goldberg points out that it was liberals — not conservatives — who were the biggest advocates of eugenics; that America’s most racist (and fascistic) president was the arch-liberal Woodrow Wilson; and that during the supposedly wondrous New Deal of the beloved liberal president FDR, an immigrant dry-cleaner could have his door kicked in and be imprisoned for cleaning suits for five cents less than the agreed government minimum, while Nuremberg-style rallies — prompting a visiting British Independent Labour MP to complain it all felt far too much like Nazi Germany — were staged in New York.
Goldberg’s purpose is not to argue that liberals are bad people, still less that they’re all closet fascists. But he does want them to realise that people in glass houses are scarcely in the ideal position to throw stones. ‘I’m not a big believer in guilt by association. But their lack of self-awareness about the demons in their own midst is really astounding.’
But then, he argues, the problem with liberals is that they’ve always been so convinced of their moral righteousness that they never feel the need to analyse their position too deeply.
Some people never learn.
