(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

Re: The Left and Socialism

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No. I simply do not accept your instinctive refusal to admit that there can be such a thing as right-wing tyranny and right-wing totalitarianism. There is a subtext to everything you say, which is that, right=freedom, left=unfreedom. That is simply something you have to get over, because you will find nobody outside a part of the American Republican and Libertarian parties who will agree with you. It would make more sense to say, extremes on both sides = unfreedom, moderates on both sides = freedom.

Besides, what I said is that there really never was any such thing as a straight left-right polarity in American politics at all, until the sixties and the rise of the New Left, which took an oppositional position to the whole American system, although for its own political purposes it prefered to infiltrate the established Democratic Party. Until then, there was a basic consensus on the American system, laws, principles and religion. For that matter, it is my view that the current muddle and misdirection of the Republican Party comes in great part from a lack of understanding of the position that the rise of a destructive rather than loyal opposition among the Democrats creates.