Quite. No Italian would listen to the Goldberg thesis with anything but hilarity. Remember that I have known and spoken with people who were there, who knew Mussolini and Fascism in the flesh. One such person is still alive in Rome today, a friend of my father's, and I talked history with him no more than a few months ago. Don't go telling me about my country's history.
What is happening is the common historical phenomenon that current events tend to create their own past histories in people's minds. What is happening now in America is as follows. First, the greatest threat to freedom of thought, speech and association in America today decidedly comes from the left, especially from the likes of the ACLU, whose activities tend to silence anyone whose views they find offensive. There is also an uneasy and unpleasant kind of fellow-travelling between such people and extreme Islam. This is a fact. And therefore, because people who are sensitive in matters of freedom of speech today see the danger as coming from the left, therefore they conceive that it has always been so. They flee to the right as the defence of their freedoms, and it does not occur to them that there have been times when the danger came from the right. And because they have identified left and assaults on liberty, by an invalid syllogism everything that assaults liberty becomes left to them. Except that at this point one has to invoke a reality check.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-05-22 08:41 pm (UTC)What is happening is the common historical phenomenon that current events tend to create their own past histories in people's minds. What is happening now in America is as follows. First, the greatest threat to freedom of thought, speech and association in America today decidedly comes from the left, especially from the likes of the ACLU, whose activities tend to silence anyone whose views they find offensive. There is also an uneasy and unpleasant kind of fellow-travelling between such people and extreme Islam. This is a fact. And therefore, because people who are sensitive in matters of freedom of speech today see the danger as coming from the left, therefore they conceive that it has always been so. They flee to the right as the defence of their freedoms, and it does not occur to them that there have been times when the danger came from the right. And because they have identified left and assaults on liberty, by an invalid syllogism everything that assaults liberty becomes left to them. Except that at this point one has to invoke a reality check.