two in one

second one today - via TPM, RedState's chief moran sends out an ill-advised tweet. (God I hate even typing tweet...)

"Linda Douglass really is the Joseph Goebbels of the White House Health Care shop," Erickson tweeted this afternoon. He echoed the sentiment on RedState's homepage, wondering if Douglass "likes" being the Goebbels of the Health Reform Office.

fascism of the day

Via ThinkProgress, some republican activist fucktard gives the latest inappropriate analogy:

Rather than cite any specific crime, Brown is demanding Obama’s removal for pursuing progressive agenda items like health and clean energy reform. His website blares: “Are you willing to let [Obama] construct a totalitarian regime… fascism, socialism, Obamaism… take your pick?”

Yes... "Take your pick." That's actually a pretty good expression of what's going on here. They want to just pick whichever criticizing term they feel like using at the time, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with anything.

because banning gays is preserving liberty...

...and preventing Nazism. Because Nazis loved gays.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) goes on a bizzare stream of consciousness rant on the House floor. TPM links the video.

Neiwert vs Goldberg continues

The Doughy One tweets: "Dave Neiwert's a very sad case who thinks that repeating the same dumb argument makes it smarter." Good god, I can't think of a better case against Twitter than how perfect a medium it is for this fool.

Dave responds at C&L:

So this is how Goldberg responds to an actually serious critique.

Evidently, Goldberg thinks that ignoring a sound argument lets you declare victory over it.

Now, just to be clear: Goldberg has never responded to the core of my critique. He's tossed off side issues, but what I have said about Liberal Fascism from the get-go is that its central thesis -- that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left" -- simply does not have any grounding in, and is indeed refuted by, the actual historical facts about the "political space" which fascism historically occupied.

Really makes me sad...

link dump

"Micro-scripts" -- a few good ideas in the article but generally pretty superficial. ("Guess who's losing the great phrase face-off" in Boston.com, by Bill Schley. By an author of a new book by the same title.

Some good links from Dave Neiwert on how Liberal Fascism transmitted through the discourse. Sad sad sad. ("Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?")

Finally, an article in Columbia Journalism Review that contemplates why some protests get coverage and some don't. (Teabaggers, astroturfed town hall riots = yes. Protests at a health care CEO's house? No -- "too staged" according to the journalists.)

Vidal Sasoon: scourge of fascists!

Who'da thunkit? Harry at CT makes an offhand joke about Vidal Sassoon's history as a nazi-fighter... and it's true!!

And so it was that the fresh-faced cockney (the measured, mid-Atlantic tones of the modern Vidal are the product of elocution lessons taken in the 1950s) signed up with the 43 Group, a crudely armed paramilitary force which began as 43 Jewish ex-servicemen and which by its peak was to number more than 1,000 Jews and gentiles, men and women. "We had turned the cheek for the last time," says Sassoon, who heard about it on the Whitechapel grapevine. "And as a 17-year-old recruit, I was proud to be involved. The men were mostly ex-servicemen, unsung heroes who had fought for five years and had come back to be abused by fascists as they walked down the street. They didn't want anything but peace, but it was disgusting that having just fought a war against Nazism, home-grown fascists were allowed to start reorganising. Something had to be done.

...

A boy amongst hardened fighting men, Sassoon was to become one of the toughest and keenest of all the informal soldiers.

"He was only a kid, but he was a tough little shtarka", says a former group commander and comrade, retired paratrooper Gerry Lambert, using a Yiddish word that corresponds, more or less, to hard man. Many former 43ers remember Vidal well and his solid reputation of standing firm when the fists started flying. "To think what a big deal hairdresser he would become," said one of the veterans. "You would never have guessed to see him there, deep in the fray. At that time he was just the sort of guy you wanted standing right by your side when the fighting started. And back then, of course, we often had to break the law. It was out of necessity. We had to use the same weapons as the fascists did: knuckle-dusters, coshes, and cut throat razors".

Wow! One to pull out in future lectures for the kids who only know him as a stylist.

Pantload: not just horribly wrong, but boring too

More from Dave -- roundup of some more reviews savaging the Doughy One. ("Tedious and inane")

anti-Pantload quotables

From Sadly, No -- a post that makes me sad. First, their link to a comment by John Emerson at Crooked Timber, who first nails DP as a lazy undergrad, but then shakes his head:

[T]he U.S. is doomed. Goldberg is going to successfully pull this off. The big Movement Conservatives will support him, or at least not blow his cover. The big media people will continue to pay him lots of money. And with his help, the American people will become just a smidgen stupider.

And Sadly's HTML Menken observes:

On the one pudgy hand, Pantload’s book — dishonestly and preposterously, natch — inoculates the Right from any association with or responsibility for historically extremist ideologies, pushing the historical blame, as it were, entirely on the Left. On the other, and in the more general sense, it simultaneously broadens wingnuts’ pejorative lexicon while narrowing liberals’.

It’s not about arguing over history at all; it’s about putting ammo — dishonest, historically illiterate ammo, to be sure, but then these people don’t care — into the hands of legions of True Believers. And no amount of incisive, historically informed criticism will stop it; if anything, the more we lefties prove that Jonah’s book is a pile of dogshit, the more we confirm wingnuts’ belief that it’s pure gold. Twenty years from now trolls will cite that renowned, famously persecuted scholar Jonah Goldberg in calling our kind Hitler’s descendants.

Sadly, sad. For America.

note to self

In the context of this previously linked post on Pantload's souces, Dave includes a quote from Griffin's Nature of Fascism that I'll like to quote in my intro. It's on the point of not falling into the trap of taking their words at face value, and looking instead at their actions:

[A]pproaching fascism primarily in terms of political theory and the history of ideas is misleading because it detracts attention from concrete events which constitute the real 'nature of fascism' and moreover euphemizes the immense human suffering caused when nebulous fascist ideals and policies became translated into gruesome political realities.

Yep.

Wilson's 'fascism' (sic)

Orcinus reader and historian who specializes in Wilson writes in to destroy the Pantload's chapter on Woodrow. A short summary:

Sure, Wilson was a racist. But so were most Americans at the time (note the lack of resistance to segregation, and the Republicans' declining to reverse Wilson's racist policies in the federal government once they took over). As this prof says, "To put it crudely, all fascists are racist, not all racists are fascist."

He grades Wilson on Payne's 13 points of definition:

• Wilson fails on the 'fascist negations' (being liberal himself, disliking communism but not really caring about it, and thinking conservatives too backwards);
• on fascist goals he gets a full point for suppression of dissent, plus a half point for imperial interventions in Mexico and Haiti;
• on fascist 'mobilizing passions' he gets a meager two points: one for strong executive aspects, and two halfpoints on a few others.

So that's a total of 4 of 13... and that's with him being generous. Wilson does similarly bad on Paxton's list. In total:

Wilson isn't scoring too highly on the fascism scale. Basically he fits Jonah's version of fascism because he supported reform and was a racist. Not exactly a convincing argument. Where's the love of war? It's not there. Where's the scapegoating of a minority? Again, it's not there, expect for a short period during the war. Where is the religious hatred? Wilson appointed the first Jewish and Catholic professors at Princeton and the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court. Where is the love of the military? Wilson respected the military but believed it had to be subservient to civilian leadership.

But what about showing Birth of a Nation in the White House? That means he's racist! And therefore fascist!

Birth of a Nation! I hear you cry. Yes, he saw it in the White House. (It was, for what it's worth, the second movie shown in the White House, not the first.) He was friends with Thomas Dixon in grad school, briefly. They stayed in touch, but were not close. Dixon asked Wilson to view a new movie that was a wonderful new teaching tool. Wilson loved movies and agreed. It was shown in the White House because Wilson was in mourning and so could not go to the theater (his wife died in August 1914; Birth was shown in February 1915). Did he say "It's like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true."? Probably not. The only eyewitness account, taken down decades later, claimed he sat silently through the movie and left without saying a word. I've held his program from the movie. It's been wadded up into a ball. His friend Dr. Cary Grayson picked it up and saved it. Did Wilson wad it up as he sat? We don't know, but it is an interesting possibility. He treated most of his theater programs gently.

Wilson MAY have told D.W. Griffith that "it's like teaching history with lightning", especially since the movie was promoted to Wilson as a new teaching tool. But the rest of the quote is likely Dixon's invention. I've spent a couple years tracking down the origins of this quote and I am fairly certain now that he did not praise Birth as in the quote, and in fact he refused to endorse or condemn it.

What a great service Dave provides by forwarding this professor's detailed thoughts. As for the Pantload... Dave himself has some comments on his sources. Lively and Abrams... lovely. A lot of other crap in there too.

I gather he just found the weight of historical evidence, which clearly shows a vicious anti-homosexuality as an expression of Nazi ideology in action, too "confusing" because it tended to obliterate the non-sequitur he wanted to publish.

A very serious argument that has never before been made with such care! Can't wait to get my hands on this. But refuse to pay more than a buck or so for it used.

Goldberg links

So that was a long time between posts. In the meantime, Doughy Pantload's well-researched argument that has never before been made with such care has come out. It makes me cry inside. Here's a quick link list of some of the more effective takedowns:

In which Jonah asks his readers to research for him.

Followed by a Spencer scholar who actually responded to DP's request... and was rebuffed when the answer didn't suit what DP wanted. Bonus quote: "Where to begin? YOU ARE A BAD JEW . (Sorry. Just slipped out.)"

This guy also shows the problem at the heart of the Pantload's book: the fallacy of the undistributed middle:

All [animal rights activists] believe [in animal rights].

All [Nazis] believe [in animal rights].

Therefore all [animal rights activists] are [Nazis].

Logic is fun! I want to do more!

All [liberals] believe [orgasms are fun].

All [Nazis] believe [orgasms are fun].

Therefore all [liberals] are [Nazis].

Over here, Matthew Yglesias discusses why it's so hard to take the Pantload seriously.

"It seems that nothing gets conservatives off nearly so much as writing obviously unserious books with patently offensive titles, designed in every way to not be taken seriously, and then get huffy when people make fun of them without having given their precious works the deep consideration they deserve."

Sadly, No! has done the most work on this, from even before the thing came out. They note that DP says:

"For many socialists and progressives, socialism was racism and racism was socialism. Nazism was socialism for a race. The Nazi view was uglier and more extreme than anyone else’s, but it was not philosophically so distinct from the views of many progressives in America and socialists in Britain."

So what does it then mean that DP's own publication, the National Review', has its own long and distinguished history of racism. Doesn't that make them Nazis? Or at least "socialists" of some kind?

Sadly trashes DP's performance in a Salon interview. The best part: "the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I". Yeah, it has nothing to do with the fact that he, uh... FOUNDED THE FASCIST PARTY.

Teh stupid. it hurtz.

Rather than fry brain anymore right now, I'll just link to Neiwert's definitive review, his correct description of how fascists' occupation of the right in both voting patterns and financial support, and his bibliography of books where you could actually learn something. DN also comments on some specific factual errors resulting from mistranslations (see Sans Everything on the lack of research and linguistic knowledge that went into this, contrasted with how conservatives used to practice scholarship).

THIS is the definitive post on the substance of DP's book. Followed by the appendix with real sources (Orwell, Payne, Paxton, Eco, Griffin). Good work, Dave! You're a trooper!

And finally, he directs to John Emerson's review, which discusses how hard it is to respond to tripe like this.

Liberal Fascism v3.0

Goldberg's back with a new title for his never-to-be-released steaming load of feces book "Liberal Fascism". From Shakesville:

the new new re-re-title is to be Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Well, he's dropped the "totalitarian temptation" thing, but now of course he faces a new problem. Even if you think Mussolini was a member of the "left" (and he wasn't), he was certainly and unambiguously never a member of the American left, or the American anything. But who cares? Mussolini's back in, which means I get to throw this in Goldberg's face repeatedly, just as I'd hoped to:

Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere. -- Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism

PWNED!!

Godwin's Law overdrive

From Orcinus, reports on the recent right-wing surge in 'leftists are Nazis' rhetoric. Sara describes how this is a two-step process: first, sever fascism from its right-wing roots; second, redefine it as a phenomenon of the left.

If the right can pull off this semantic trick, they win in two ways. First, we will no longer be able to have serious conversations -- like the ones we've had here for the past four-plus years -- about the very real ways in which American conservatives are pulling us toward genuine fascism. They'll have stolen away the language that will allow us to convict them of their crimes against democracy. We won't be able to measure their deeds by holding them up against those of previous right-wing authoritarians -- the comparisons will be simply impossible, because the definitions of the terms will be too murky to be useful. Or worse: they'll now mean something else entirely.

And evidently Oprah is a Nazi, according to radio host Bryan Suits, because she supports someone of the same race for president. So I guess by that logic all white people throughout American history are racists too?

the nature of fascism

Via Sadly, No! an essay by AJP Taylor on the nature of fascism, from 1957. Evidently it was a whole series on the -isms. Good reading, possible assignment.