Is it so difficult to understand that I regard Jew-bashing as loathsome and unforgivable?

[fpb]

I recently wrote an article against a fraudulent and detestable book by a Jewish author. The book itself had almost nothing to do with Hebraism, being an atrocious falsification of the facts of European political history, and especially of the Socialist movement and of that larger and more vague current of opinion that can be defined as Progressive or Modernist. And the fact that I compared it to one of the most loathsome pieces of Jew-bashing in history should indicate to anyone with a brain (that, alas, excludes most Jew-bashers) that I consider BOTH to be the lowest kind of Index-worthy political pornography, appealing to the lowest human passions, in revolt against reason and decency, and unworthy of serious debate. I condemn one detestable book by one Jewish author exactly as I condemn the whole field of Jew-bashing.

(That does not exclude that some anti-semites have had interesting and even worthwhile things to say. Apart from GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who both took the field against Nazi Jew-bashing as soon as they heard of it, one could think of E.Michael Jones. But cases such as these are rare, and barely worth mentioning.)

Let it therefore be quite clear that anyone who tries to pervert my views in the service of a Jew-bashing agenda will find himself deleted and banned. Jew-bashers and other hatemongers are not welcome here. And yes, I have a specific person in mind; one, alas, who claims to be a Christian minister.

Comments

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

The confusion comes, perhaps, from the fact that you drew attention to the religion of the author. For myself I fail to see what that had to do with the contents of the book or the validity of his argument. I'd suspect mischievousness, if I was capable of spelling it....

[fpb.livejournal.com]

NO, the confusion was deliberate. The person concerned was out to raise dust, using my admittedly controversial use of the most notorious historical forgery ever to imply that somehow the evilness of the Joooooos had come back at me in the person of Jonah Goldberg. It was a classic case of twisting words and facts; which, itself, shows this person's bad faith.

That is not to say that honest and decent persons have not found my use of this comparison to condemn a Jewish author's writings in poor taste. That is their right; but to distort it to try and "prove" that I had done anything wrong when I had taken this person's anti-Israel ravings and torn them to pieces, simply is not. If nothing else, because the issue had nothing to do with Israel.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

Accepting that the person you have referred to has a specific agenda, can you explain why you titled your original article the way you did? It does, from the outside looking in, seem a little like a stick used to poke a few people into reaction. As the book in question had nothing to do with religion or Israel, it does seem perverse to draw attention to the religion of the author. To use a local idiom, "you a bit of a wind-up merchant?"

I'll have to look back at earlier posts to see the conversations you are referring to. I read the original article today. I have to say that the terms left and right wing seen totally inadequate to describe the differences between the political groupings mentioned in the article. From my perspective, all american politics seems vaguely 'right wing' with the general acceptance of a free-market as a prerequisite for a democracy. But that ignores all the other variation between the american parties.

I'd argue that the terms become even more meaningless when applied to totalitarian regimes. They may, imperfectly, describe the origins of the movements which led to a dictatorship, but in most other regards the differences between a left and right wing dictatorship are meaningless. It is wrong to tarnish democratic parties, of whatever hue, with the excesses of the regimes that perhaps share their origins..... But that will not stop it from being a tactic used by supporters of many political movements.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

To answer your question: I used the name by instinct, but to explain that instinct, I needed a title that was universally known and despised, and deservedly despised, as a political fraud of the lowest kind. The Protocols seem obvious. Remember, I am speaking not of an ideology, however despicable, as such, so much as of an actual act of fraud. Something like Mein Kampf or the theoretical tracts of Vladimir Lenin would not suit; they have a more enduring purpose than the intellectual fraud of Mr.Goldberg, which was written purely in the shadow of transient party clashes in the USA. I regard Mr.Goldberg's tract as a particularly grotesque act of party political warfare, and I wanted to underline just how odious it was to connect the peaceful and parliamentary Socialist movement with its murderous hireling enemies.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

I haven't read either Liberal Fascism or (therefore) your comments on it, but is it your contention that the book is not merely partisan and wrongheaded but a conscious fraud?

(Even that would not justify a comparison to the Protocols in my opinion, since I think that the intent to justify violence and/or repression would also be an essential element, but I would at least be able to understand it.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The association of the European Socialist movement, whose history is mostly peaceful and parliamentarian, with Fascism, which was consciously set up by enemies of Socialism to destroy it by force, which despises parliamentary principles, and which was violent from the beginning and as a matter of "principle", is, to me, so revolting, that I do not care whether Mr.Goldberg was sincere or not. If he was, he is an even more dangerous cretin.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

All right, in that case, let us compare it to The Da Vinci Code.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I have not managed to get one single one of my American readers to even understand the difference between Socialist and Marxist, let alone anything else I argued there. Frankly, I do not know why I should bother any further. I do not think that the free market as such is necessarily conservative - it is perfectly compatible, for instance, with a co-operative form of property (the League of Cooperatives in Italy is one of the biggest and most successful corprations in the world) and could not exist at all without regulation, since an unregulated market turns inevitably into a monopoly.

Not one single one of your American readers?

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

I humbly beg to differ. I am one of your American readers. The difference between Marxist and socialist is perfectly clear. Marx condemned as 'unscientific' the more democratic socialist movements that grew out of Rousseau's original seed of thought.

Marx was a radical Utopianist who followed Hegel, and analyzed history in terms of inevitable clashes of the economic categories of behavior (he called them classes, but this is an error. Moneylenders are not a class, but a type of marketplace behavior that men of any class can do). Other socialist writers do not share this obsession with dialectic materialism, or the other metaphysical historicism of Marx: they want to use collective bargaining, land reform, checks on private ownership of property, state management or outright state ownership of factories, rails and other high-entry-cost industries to address what they regard as social inequities. They are socialists properly so called, but they are not obsessed with the millenarian visions unique to Marx.

Most socialists are not totalitarians, or, at least, not deliberately so. Most socialists think socialism is not incompatible with democracy and limited government. This is a sharp distinction from Marx, who envisioned a society radically re-structured to a moneyless economy, ruled by a temporary (but unlimited) dictatorship of the working class.

You probably did not notice, but I said that Americans tend to over-state their oppositions to their own parties in the USA. Republicans routinely call socialization, for example, of the medical industry "Marxist" even though no mainstream Democrat party member is a Marxist, and relatively few are consistent hard-core socialists. Most of the "Left" (so-called) in America are believers and Capitalism and the free market; they merely want more state regulation and collectivism than their more liberal (I use the term in its original sense) Republican counterparts.

You probably did not notice, but I said that grouping Democratic Socialists and Christian Socialists under the same "Left" heading as Stalinists and Marxists was as misleading as grouping Nazis and Tories under the heading "Right." It is definition by non-essentials.

Do you recall this conversation? My suggestion was to use a term like "Prussianism" to refer to that movement in German politics toward totalitarianism, which started with Bismarck and ended with Hitler.

So, do not despair. Some of your American readers do grasp what you are talking about, whether we agree with your conclusion or not.

Also, your continued insistence that Goldberg's book is some transient phenomenon is wrongheaded. As I explained more than once, those of us who regard the National Socialists of Germany to be Socialists and therefore on the "Left" have been around for DECADES. All Goldberg did is write up this conclusion in a book.

Leftist in American have been calling Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and even Objectivists and semi-anarchists "Nazis" and "Fascists" ever since World War II. This is partly just name-calling, but, oddly, it is partly because some people actually seem to think Mussolini and Hitler were Monarchists, or supporters of the Free Market, or supporters of limited-government Jeffersonian or Madisonian Federalism, or supporters of the Holy Roman Empire. My humble opinion is that the fascists are a left-wing and not a right-wing phenomenon, to the degree that those classifications have any meaning at all.

Let me ask you a question: is Goldberg honestly the first writer you have ever heard making this argument? I am not asking whether you think he is right or wrong, contemptible or admirable. I am asking whether you think he is new?

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Look, let me point out one thing. You are American. I am a citizen of the Italian Republic. I was born in the year of the Lord 1962, when Fascism was not only a memory but a presence. I would be surprised if you had met a real live Fascist; I have met them by the dozen - the real thing, people who had taken part in the regime, who remembered Mussolini and Hitler personally. Even now, one such man - well into his eighties, but keen and lively enough - is among my acquaintences. When you talk about Fascism, you talk about my past, not about yours. And that being the case, I resent intensely your constant imposition of (to say the least) inadequate and alien notions on a reality I know as intimately as I know myself. This is my country, my past, my friends, that you misrepresent. You have no idea what Fascism is and what Fascists are. Take, for instance, your bizarre notion that Mussolini was anything but a monarchist. I tell you with the authority of a son of the country: it would make any Italian howl with laughter. Why, the king appointed him, the king supported him, the king ennobled his followers by the dozen, the king accepted at his hands the title of Emperor of Ethiopia and King of Albania and Montenegro; and Mussolini only remembered some republican principles when his royal accomplice, after twenty-one years of sharing the loot, arrested and jailed him when things started going wrong. King and Duce stood and fell together, and the monarchy did not survive the end of Fascism. But those little misunderstandings have since been clarified. In I think 1972, the Monarchist party and the neo-Fascist MSI joined together to form a new party called Destra Nazionale ("National Right"). And indeed, in Italy, to say Io sono di destra, "I belong to the right wing", is the polite way of saying that one is a Fascist, and is thus understood by everyone. In a country where everyone talks politics, it could hardly be otherwise.

I did not want to carry on this debate, because you are plainly in the wrong and I do not see any way whatsoever to convince you of it. What you say is completely false, absolutely opposite to the past and present of my country and my continent. That being the case, I really do not see any reason to do more than state my position and leave it at that. I am not even interested in whether anyone has stated the same unhistorical nonsense. I say that it is offensive nonsense and that it has no chance whatsoever of being taken seriously by anyone with the slightest acquaintance with my country.

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

FPB....

He asked a single question.

You react like he insulted your mother.

If you have such an emotional reaction, why do you keep bringing the subject up?

I asked before, and I ask again: have you even read his arguments as to the *American left* being the intellectual cousins of various movements?

You're usually a very sensible person who uses brain before rage-- what he heck, man?

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

you react like he insulted your mother

Fascism and its meaning have an absolutely primary relationship with my country. As a historian and as an Italian citizen, I positively cannot allow a misrepresentation on this scale to pass unchallenged: have you not understood that you and johncwright are asking me to falsify the facts of my own life?

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

But you have not shown that misprepresentation actually happened!
For all you know, the reviewers of the work were the ones misrepresenting!

I point this out because it is VERY uncharacteristic of you.

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Isn't the title enough? "Liberal Fascism". Italian newspapers have noticed it with disbelief; to us, you might as well speak of dry water or healthy disease.

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

"Isn't the title enough? The author equates a Jew with anti-Jewish slander." (pardon the parody, but I hope it will at least get your attention)

Just because the "liberals" of your country are something it does not follow that the "liberals" of another nation are such people.

People have been observing that the "liberals" of America are FAR from "Liberal"-- in the true, classic sense-- for ages, now. That may be part of why they're switching to "progressive" as a self-identifier.

As much as I hate the fact, the English language is being splintered into different meanings depending on where you happen to be at the moment. (for a very basic example, Asian in America means Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Thai/Vietnam; in England, it means what Americans would call Islamic/Arabic/Middle Eastern.)

In short: please at least read the argument before you dismiss it out-of-hand.

As you point out, often, you are Italian. That means that American English isn't your main language. Thus, the subtleties of the American English meaning MAY be different than what you are hearing.

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is beside the point. I dislike the policies of Barrack Obama, as I dislike those of Zapatero or Balkenende. But to compare them to Fascism is crass. Fascism was about murder. It was about the deliberate, intended, purposeful desruction of democracy. It was about the deliberate, intended, purposeful imposition of a tyrannical caste state. It was about warmongering. It was about police oppression. If you want to compare anyone to Fascists, try Vladimir Putin.

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

But he is not writing about Putin. He is writing about "the American Left"-- as the title of his book states.

In fact, Mr. Goldberg didn't even CREATE the quote that has you so upset-- he is quoting H. G. Wells. (I'm assuming you'll allow that Mr. Wells has the right to claim his people should mimic Fascism, since he lived in the right era?)
http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/4/541

Quote:
Admiration for Mussolini in the United States was widespread, and H. G. Wells, the socialist's socialist and one of the most influential figures in collectivist politics in the first half of the twentieth century said in a speech at Oxford in 1932, “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

If I take your word for what the word "Right" means in Italy, will you take mine for what the word "Right" means in America? It reflects our politics, not yours. The "Right" in America means small-government of limited powers, pro-free trade, federalist, social conservative, Christian.

You once said that Fascist existed only to kill Communists. You said that was their function and their defining purpose. Very well. I say to you that the Conservative movement in America exists only to kill Fascists. We are the Sons of Liberty and our enemies are tyrants and totalitarians. That is our function and our defining purpose.

Will you take my word that I know American politics as well as you know Italian?

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

In that case, I take it that the all-American Father Charles Coughlin and Rev. Gerald LK Smith (Catholic and Disciples of Christ, respectively) were lefties? Look them up. These were not minor figures: Coughlin, at the height of his success, had forty million listeners to his radio program, in a country of 150 million.

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

Is this the same Father Coughlin who used his radio pulpit to criticize the Hoover administration for being too laissez-faire? Is this the same one who famously declared that Capitalism was dying and not worth saving--that it should be replaced by "State Capitalism"? Is this the Father Coughlin who criticized Hoover for not federalizing the welfare system (up until then a state and local matter)?

Is this the same Father Coughlin who shilled for Franklin Roosevelt?

Based on what little I know of him, I would say he is one of your party, Comrade, not one of mine.

If you will not take my word of honor for it that republicans exist only to fight tyrants, why should I take your word of honor for it that fascists exist only to fight communists?

If the political spectrum runs from Stalin on the left, to British Labour in the middle to Mussolini on the right, where is one to put figures who reject the political economics for which these figures stand? Where are the limited-government pro-free-market anti-Statist free men?

Where do you put gun owners?

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Like most contemporary neocons, Coughlin was a former left-wing fanatic who had been "mugged by reality". Only, he went all the way and became a fanatical and dangerous Hitler booster. Roosevelt actually had to ask the Pope to shut him up when he was preparing to take America into the war - that is how dangerous he was.

Re: Not one single one of your American readers?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

OH, and I notice you said nothing about Gerald "my shirts are browner than your shirts" Smith.

[marielapin.livejournal.com]

Is the co-operative property ownership you are talking of similar to distributivism?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Not that I know of. From what I can see, Chesterton envisaged a property broken up into small individual units. The problem is that that is not really feasible with, for instance, a mining company or a large manufacturer. Big business, much though we may dislike it, is part of the landscape. Its power is immense and fundamentally irresponsible, so some way of coping with it is necessary.

(The enormous success of the League of Cooperatives also has to do with peculiar historical features that are not easily transferred outside its native Italian regions, and which would take too long to detail here.)

[marielapin.livejournal.com]

Well I have just barely started reading up on distributivism on the ChesterBelloc Mandate Blog:

http://distributist.blogspot.com/2007/08/introduction-to-distributism.html

and they claim that the Mondragón Cooperative works under distributivistic principles and it is the 7th largest company in Spain. If that is not big business, I don't know what is. I can't really give any more information, as I just started reading about this literally two nights ago, but your mentioning the co-operatives made me wonder if you were referring to something like distributivism, which seems to be a middle ground between capitalism and socialism.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sounds good to me. I evidently was wrong, so I apologize.