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by 82_28 » Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:10 pm
by barracuda » Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:16 pm
82_28 wrote:My goodness! This Glenn Beck guy
by slomo » Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:37 pm
by Simulist » Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:58 pm
by Nordic » Sun Jan 24, 2010 2:15 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 24, 2010 2:20 pm
by American Dream » Mon Jan 25, 2010 3:07 pm
BECK: It is history that is not being taught in classrooms in America. But tomorrow night, you're going to see it -- the true, unseen history of Marxism, progressivism, and communism. You gonna see what Michael Moore's beloved Cuba really is, at least the way only the people who are lucky enough to live through Castro's regime remember. You're going to see Che. I love this guy. He's not really the happy-go-lucky kid who rode around on his motorcycle like Hollywood tells us he is. His real exploits will make even the more granola hippie lose their Che shirt. We also have footage from the Soviet Union that has been buried in the vaults of the KGB.
[...]
Well, you see, the dirty little secret that communists, Marxists, and progressives don't want you to know is their system has never ever worked.
And not only has it never worked, it has led to some of the most horrifying outcomes in history. You think that guy -- you think that guy was the only one that did it? And you think this guy is from the right? Oh, yeah, really?
Make sure you tune in tomorrow. People wouldn't support Mao and they wouldn't be wearing a Mao hat if they knew they were endorsing somebody who killed tens of millions of people. That's Anita Dunn -- she said, you know, "One of the great philosophers that I think of most is Mao."
She knows who he is, but most Americans don't, because progressives tend to breeze past that little speed bump in history. I told you back in December that this program is going to change. Tomorrow is the first real step in that direction.
You see, progressives knew 100 years ago you can't win a battle against our Founding Fathers. Progressives had to change the course of history by changing history itself. If you can convince people that killers are cool, and get them to wear a t-shirt, you'll win their hearts and minds.
by sunny » Mon Jan 25, 2010 3:32 pm
by 82_28 » Mon Jan 25, 2010 8:27 pm
For those who watched Beck's "special," the following excerpt from Paxton's piece alone may suffice:
Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice. Since the Nazis recruited their first mass following among the economic and social losers of Weimar Germany, they could sound anti-capitalist at the beginning. Goldberg makes a big thing of the early programs of the Nazi and Italian Fascist Parties, and publishes the Nazi Twenty-five Points as an appendix. A closer look would show that the Nazis’ anti-capitalism was a selective affair, opposed to international capital and finance capital, department stores and Jewish businesses, but nowhere opposed to private property per se or favorable to a transfer of all the means of production to public ownership.
A still closer look at how the fascist parties obtained power and then exercised power would show how little these early programs corresponded to fascist practice. Mussolini acquired powerful backing by hiring his black-shirted squadristi out to property owners for the destruction of socialist and Communist unions and parties. They destroyed the farm workers’ organizations in the Po Valley in 1921-1922 by violent nightly raids that made them the de facto government of northeastern Italy. Hitler’s brownshirts fought Communists for control of the streets of Berlin, and claimed to be Germany’s best bulwark against the revolutionary threat that still appeared to be growing in 1932. Goldberg prefers the abstractions of rhetoric to all this history, noting only that fascism and Communism were “rivals.” So his readers will not learn anything about how the Nazis and Italian Fascists got into power or exercised it.
The two fascist chiefs obtained power not by election nor by coup but by invitation from German President Hindenberg and his advisors, and Italian King Victor Emanuel III and his advisors (not a leftist among them). The two heads of state wanted to harness the fascists’ numbers and energy to their own project of blocking the Marxists, if possible with broad popular support. This does not mean that fascism and conservatism are identical (they are not), but they have historically found essential interests in common.
Once in power, the two fascist chieftains worked out a fruitful if sometimes contentious relationship with business. German business had been, as Goldberg correctly notes, distrustful of the early Hitler’s populist rhetoric. Hitler was certainly not their first choice as head of state, and many of them preferred a trading economy to an autarcic one. Given their real-life options in 1933, however, the Nazi regulated economy seemed a lesser evil than the economic depression and worker intransigence they had known under Weimar. They were delighted with Hitler’s abolition of independent labor unions and the right to strike (unmentioned by Goldberg), and profited greatly from his rearmament drive. All of them would have found ludicrous the notion that the Nazis, once in power, were on the left. So would the socialist and communist leaders who were the first inhabitants of the Nazi concentration camps (unmentioned by Goldberg).
by 82_28 » Mon Jan 25, 2010 8:46 pm
It has now been just a little over two years since the release of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Despite its provocative title and thesis – and particularly its open challenge to the established historical assessment of the nature of fascism among academics – it was greeted largely with silence among those academic historians and political scientists.
Few spoke out, as Roger Griffin suggests, because they recognized that Goldberg’s book was more of an exercise in polemics than a historical work, and as such not really appropriate for academic consideration. Its use of history was so shoddy and propagandistic, and its claims so frankly absurd, that very few of them considered it worth taking seriously.
And yet, here we are two years later, and it turns out that many people indeed have taken Goldberg’s book seriously. Not only was Liberal Fascism a national bestseller, but its core 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” – has become widely accepted conventional wisdom among American conservatives, and has played a significant role in the national discourse. Along the way, it morphed into the claim that the agenda of Democratic liberals, and particularly President Obama, was an innately fascist attempt to impose a totalitarian state, something Goldberg himself only intimated in the book, though he later confirmed it in a National Review article.
Nowhere is this more evident than at gatherings of the Tea Party movement, the right-wing populist phenomenon that has sprung up in opposition to the policies for which Barack Obama was elected president. It is common at Tea Party rallies to see signs equating Obama with Hitler, and declaring the current regime “fascist.”
Similarly, Goldberg’s thesis has become the running theme for Glenn Beck’s wildly popular Fox News program, in which Beck regularly insists that Obama is secretly a radical fascist (or Marxist, or socialist, or Communist, depending on that day’s flavor), and that the progressive movement – dating back to Woodrow Wilson – not only is at the root of all the nation’s miseries, but represents a concerted effort to remake America as a totalitarian state. Beck has regularly equated fascism with progressivism, a claim central to Goldberg’s book. And indeed, Goldberg himself has appeared on Beck’s show numerous times to promote these claims.
Beck is hardly alone in this regard. At various times, such right-wing pundits as Rush Limbaugh (for whom the claim was actually old hat), Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage have promoted the “liberal fascism” thesis as well.
-snip-
-snip-
What's most noteworthy, perhaps, about this episode is the way Goldberg's thesis was used to attack anyone who pointed out the frequently violent and intimidating behavior of the extremists who increasingly populated the ranks of the Tea Party movement. It wasn’t the right-wing protesters openly carrying weapons, Obama=Hitler signs, and loudly disrupting the discussion of health-care reform at town-hall sessions who were behaving like Brownshirts, they insisted – it was the liberals who showed enough nerve to stand up to them.
This absorption of the "liberal fascism" thesis dangerously distorts the public discourse precisely because, like so many other components of right-wing belief systems, it’s fundamentally untrue. As the four essays that follow make thoroughly clear, the historical record itself unequivocally repudiates Goldberg's thesis. As such, Liberal Fascism has distorted and polluted the public’s understanding of the nature of fascism, nearly to the point of rendering the word essentially meaningless.
by 82_28 » Mon Jan 25, 2010 10:40 pm
TheSamma: You are a typical liberal idiot. The Nazis were very left wing. It is true they hated the communists, but they advanced the same arguments, total government control, brain washing the people with propaganda, the censoring of free speech and murdering people they disagree with by the millions. Sounds like the Obama's and the rest of the Hitler Youth of Reid, Pelosi Gore and Biden with the mass murders, yet.
by sunny » Mon Jan 25, 2010 11:06 pm
by 82_28 » Tue Jan 26, 2010 2:22 am
New to the poll: Fox News personality Glenn Beck, who debuted at No. 2, while Bill O'Reilly returned to No. 10 after a one-year absence from the list. Liberal host Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" was in the middle, holding steady at No. 6.
by Nordic » Tue Jan 26, 2010 2:47 am
by 82_28 » Tue Jan 26, 2010 3:22 am
Or was that all bullshit? Were the WTO protests all 100% provocateur stuff?
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