I feel like I’m spending most of my time on this blog responding to attacks to Jonah’s book on Liberal Fascism. On the one hand, I don’t mind – my book is meant as a companion piece to his, fleshing out certain arguments as well as chronicling the creation of his Liberal Fascism. And it seems that Jonah is too busy handling more intellectually weighty critiques. Still, I had hoped by this point the Liberal Fascists would have attacked me directly. It seems they are still too scared.
No matter. I will now take on a scurrilous complaint by the ever-scurrilous Dave Neiwert who, in a pathetic and desperate fit of inchoate hysteria, broadens his shameless attacks to include Jonah’s impeccable sources and scrupulous historical methodology:
One point that has already raised eyebrows is his depiction, on pp. 378-379, of the Nazi attitudes toward homosexuals:
[...]Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams write in The Pink Swastika that “the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi Party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sadomasochists.” [...]
[... N]ote who Goldberg cites here: The Pink Swastika and its authors, Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. Bob Moser at the SPLC has the rundown on this text, which is nothing less than a work of Holocaust revisionism [...]
But Lively and Abrams are hardly the only dubious source Goldberg indulges. Indeed, another — historian A. James Gregor, known for his contention that fascism was an ideology of the left — is almost certainly the chief philosophical mentor of the book’s central thesis, which makes the same claim. Goldberg cites him twice in the text and several other times in his endnotes. [...]
We can further assess Gregor’s reliability by noting that he has played a role in the past in similarly muddying the waters of public discourse — particularly, as it happens, on the subject of race and racial segregation in the South.
DO NOT read the whole thing, because Mr. Neiwert is an arrogant liberal fascist who has no serious intellectual interest in the subject of fascism. Additionally, there is no point in reading this.
I should add, before Mr. Neiwert attacks my sources and methodology, that I have based my arguments entirely on primary sources such as Hitler’s diary and The Protocols of the Elders of Haight-Ashbury, as well as back issues of The New American. Any complaints about my methodology are therefore elitist ivory tower nonsense. And everyone who agrees with me on everything agrees.
January 26, 2008 at 1:12 pm
This strikes me as a lot of question-begging and blanket assertion from a writer who normally doesn’t do such things.
January 26, 2008 at 2:35 pm
This is an important point, and perhaps the biggest weakness of your otherwise masterful companion piece. I think the comments of Gen. Lysergic D. Shroomingham would have been helpful in this instance.
January 26, 2008 at 3:48 pm
I think anatomically my argument is very strong and your argument is nonsense on stilts with tiny jet packs attached to the stilts.
January 26, 2008 at 3:59 pm
In 1970, I sat in to ask very bad and impolite DFH questions of a John Birch Society speaker at a public event (the kind of people who make Jonah look sane, now).
I stopped on my way out at the Birch Society literature table, and picked up a 25-cent comic book: “Design For Survival”, wherein USAF General Thomas S. Powers (Ret.) spoke through the miracle of caricature to inform children, and childish adults, about the need for fear and vigilance and more fear and more vigilance; published by (no joke) Wacker Press of Chicago in ’68. I still have it.
But, hey — there’s a way to finally present Jonah’s (heh) book for the wider audience which Jonah has been down on pudgy knees begging for (since it was actually written for about ten people and their buddies and his mom — hey, Marianne; How’s Drudge? How’s Linda Tripp?).
Jonah had hoped this frothy tome would be a classic with America’s mouth-breathers; you know, they’d quote it, even though they didn’t understand it — and it could be, Jonah, if you publish it as a comic book!
You’ll think it’s like “Illustrated Classics”. I’d bet the skinhead, white pride kids would just love it.
January 26, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Did you ever consider that the reason your very serious blog was gone for while was due to the libfascs? I am blaming it on them.
January 26, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force previews The Super Bowl.
January 26, 2008 at 9:22 pm
I hereby demand you remove the comment section from this blog. Good god man, what are you thinking?
January 26, 2008 at 10:22 pm
My very thoughtful and caring review of Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg now appears on the PragPro in the form of Van Halen’s video for poundcake. I know this is a overly brainy piece but I pray that the educational system can someday teach our kids how to comprehend a serious, thoughtful, and caring piece of scholarship like I have presented. I plead to the higher conscience that it pleases Jonah, in much the same way that Brown Co-eds do not. For they are the SS and he is Anne Frank
January 26, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Philosophy with out substance, it’s not the real thing it’s Poundcake
January 27, 2008 at 7:28 am
First they came for the think tanks, but I said nothing because I wasn’t in a think tank.
Then they came for the media talking heads, but I said nothing because I wasn’t a media talking head.
Then they came for the CEOs, but I said nothing because I wasn’t a CEO.
When they came for the Lawrence Welk fan club, there was nobody left to speak for me.
January 28, 2008 at 6:34 am
Wow, Goldberg cites Gregor in his book? Awesome. I took one of his classes at Cal two years ago, he’s a real piece of work. He spent a huge amount of time going off on ridiculous rants about everything from how slutty students dress nowadays to how they have no respect, but the topic he came back to the most was how he was right about how awful Mao was and all the other leftists professors he worked with (who apparently wore jackets with Mao’s face on them? I don’t know what the fuck that was all about but he kept mentioning it) were wrong.
The first day of class he caught someone sleeping in the back. He walks up to him, wakes him up, starts yelling at the top of his lungs then calls them a stupid piece of scum and tells him he never wants to see his face in the class again. After the guy leaves the hall and the rest of the class was sitting there in stunned silence he says “What? Go ahead and write me up for that, I’m tenured.” Then there was the time where he said that the situation in Iraq was a failure of nerve and what we should have done in the first place was just level the whole place WWII style. That went over REALLY well with an audience of Berkeley polisci undergrads.
Oh, and every single required book was written by either him or his wife. I’m fairly certain the only reason he teaches is to increase his book sales.
Best ratemyprofessor.com review ever:
“Gregor is not a professor. Gregor is a way of life. Fear the Gregor. Love the Gregor. Embrace the Gregor. I had his class TEN YEARS AGO (I’m class of ’98) and I still think about it. How many reviews have you seen where the reviewer says that? Take this class. Get the Gregor experience before he dies.”
January 28, 2008 at 10:17 am
who apparently wore jackets with Mao’s face on them?
Mao jackets. Collarless jackets, like those worn by the chairman. No face.
January 28, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Well that makes a lot more sense. I’d never heard of such a thing before; obviously my education has failed me.