(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

[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.