(no subject)

[fpb]

Anyone who thinks that I was too harsh about Jonah Goldberg's repulsive and politically motivated rewriting of my own country's history ought to read today's Thomas Sowell column, where it is taken entirely at its own valuation and highly recommended as summer reading for the children of conservatives. This unhistorical, culturally imperialistic propaganda, that distorts my country's and my continent's history in the service of provincial American concerns, is going to enter the bloodstream of a whole American party, If it has not already done so. This will increase further the mutual incomprehension between USA and Europe, because you cannot stand on your two hind legs and inform anyone who knows anything of continental history - France, Italy, Germany, etc. - that Nazism and Fascism were "left wing". This sort of rubbish, especially if spoken with the arrogance of Goldberg and Sowell, will increase European contempt for American viewpoints and culture. Do we really need this sort of trash further complicating our already difficult relationship, and all for the sake of a few Republican votes in the next election?

Comments

[superversive.livejournal.com]

(since the movements in question are not only given a common identity which they did not have,

Mussolini was a left-wing Socialist until the outbreak of the Great War, at which time he took the bait of nationalism; Hitler was an open admirer of Stalin’s methods of government. It is a pity that the left-wing orthodoxy concerning Fascism and Nazism has never been fundamentally re-examined since 1945, when it ceased to be a current issue. The Communist Party line, for instance, was nearer the truth from 1939 to 1941, when it viewed Hitler as a fellow-socialist and Germany as an ally against the decadent imperialist West, than later, when it drew a largely phony diametric opposition between Nazism and Communism based purely on the fact that the two countries ruled by these systems happened to be at war. Orwell has written a great deal of sense on this topic, but I don’t suppose you have much time for Orwell, as he does not confirm your own biases.

but also opposed to American values in terms that make it clear that they must be regarded as European and typical).

There’s been a lot of this going on since the ‘typical’ Europeans nearly destroyed themselves by two gigantic fratricidal wars; and not just among Americans. It is certainly true that the U.S.A. has never succumbed to anything resembling a totalitarian form of government. Woodrow Wilson imposed a centrally-planned police state, not terribly unlike Ludendorff’s ‘War Socialism’, in 1917-18, but it was promptly dismantled as soon as the emergency of war ended — a thing no other country ever managed without outside intervention, and a sufficient testament to the resilience of the American political system and the democratic habits of the American people.

I do not say that American values are superior to European values; such a statement would be meaningless in any case, unless I specified some third standard of values by which I proposed to judge the first two — for which this is not the time or place.


Besides, if you imagine for one minute that what is said in English in the United States has no impact in the rest of the world and is not noticed there, you are living, not in Canada, but on the Moon.

Given that political cartoons printed in an unimportant newspaper in an unimportant Scandinavian country can cause rioting and bloodshed all round the world, I do not imagine any such thing. But I do deny indignantly that the Americans, or anyone else, have an obligation to censor their own political discourse to assuage the tender feelings of foreigners.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Who is "demonstraby wrong" here? First, have the goodness not to lecture me about my own country's history, with which you are evidently less than perfectly acquainted. Second, read what I have already written on the subject. This note is a brief continuation of the protest against Goldberg's disgusting thesis, which I started here http://fpb.livejournal.com/286650.html and continued here http://fpb.livejournal.com/290645.html. YOu repeat arguments to which I already gave answers, which is something I do not enjoy.

Second: what you say about the American administration is wrong twice over. Wilson's wartime administration morphed into the ugly "red scare" phenomenon, which was only ended by his incapacitation. Far, however, from being shut down, it left the country the double-edged heritage of the FBI, led by the man Wilson had placed there, the young former lawyer Edgar Hoover, who continued his fight against reds, and later against the mobs, with the illegal methods he had learned in 1919. By comparison, France, the leader of the Alliance and the country that had given most to the defeat of the Boche, dismissed its war dictator, Clemenceau, almost as soon as the guns had ceased firing, and reverted immediately to its pre-war constitutional arrangements. (In this, in fact, it acted very much like Britain in 1945 with respect to Churchill.) So I know nothing about America? I know at least enough to know that Wilson never went back to constitutional ways, as you wrongly imply.