Reflections of a stormy petrel

Yes, I expect you'll have to do so. I get things like the above article (and worse) from certain family members all the time.

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fellmama.livejournal.com

Communism looms bewilderingly large in the American psyche. Most people in the United States have no idea what it is (or what Fascism is, for that matter). It might help if you put Communism in the same conceptual category as the bogeyman--we're not sure what it is or what it would do, but we fear it all the same.

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Well... Communism does exist, though.

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fellmama.livejournal.com

True, though I don't think it's ever borne any resemblance to the way we think about it.

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marielapin.livejournal.com

People have just forgotten that words have meaning. "Commie" and "Fascist" have now become derogatory slang which keeps a person from having to use real words or a real argument.

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I wish that were the case here. Laura Hollis has just enough perception of what the Communist tradition is to make it pretty sure that she means it; but not enough to be able to distinguish between a Communist and someone who has been one way or another influenced by that tradition. The worst of all worlds, and the perfect demonstration that a little learning is a dangerous thing.

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dustthouart.livejournal.com

Indeed, it is not unimaginable to me to hear someone in a torrent of invective accuse someone of being both a commie and a fascist. And probably also a Nazi. Maybe in the form "You commie Nazi fascist bastard!" To the contemporary American mind, this is too often just like hearing "You bad bad bad thing-that-is-bad!"

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Another one who hasn't read Jonah Goldberg's book. I'm afraid I have to tell you that as of last year, the idea that Nazism and Fascism were really left-wing movements is a part of the patrimony of the American conservative movement. I tried to explain to my conservative friends that I found this both ridiculous and (as an Italian) offensively cultural-imperialist, and failed completely.

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In America today, both "communist" and "fascist" mean, approximately, "someone who has political views I don't like."

The only difference is that both the Right and the Left will sling "fascist" around, but "communist" is pretty much limited to the Right. However, Obama apparently has the amazing ability to be both a fascist and a communist at the same time.

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On the Right, "socialist", "fascist", and "communist" are becoming pretty interchangeable.

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What I called - to huge offence from some - the Protocols of Jonah Goldberg. Sorry, but politically motivated horror stories are politically motivated horror stories - whether the inventor is a Russian policeman or a Jewish American journalist.

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mmm... the Fascism-and-everything-else-bad-is-left-wing thing goes back at least to von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, of "Right is right and Left is wrong" fame. Goldberg's a relative latecomer.

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I never said that he was the first, but he adapted the fable to current political conditions and made it a prime talking point among all the angry conservatives in your country. I regard his influence as more poisonous than anyone else's, and I am willing to bet that for any person who can quote you the name of von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, ten can quote Goldberg.

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Ah, okay. I misunderstood what you were getting at.

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I did not actually read anyone who developed the thesis seriously and to book length, but I was of course conscious that it was possible to develop it. And I guess that I did come too close to saying that Goldberg was the inventor, so no problem with your understanding that that was what I meant to say. But I did not intend to say it as a statement because I know all too well that you cannot make such statements as "X was the first to do Y"...

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I take it you haven't read Jonah Goldberg's determined attempt to "prove" that Fascism and Nazism were really left-wing movements? It has been a very unfortunate hit among American conservatives - as well as one of my favourite targets all last year, for obvious reasons.

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Oh yes, I have read it (or rather, I've read summaries -- can't stomach reading more than a few paragraphs of Goldberg's actual writing), and it proves my point. To Jonah Goldberg and his fellow right-wingers, "fascist" and "communist" are essentially the same thing, since they attribute everything bad and evil to "the Left."

Hence my comment about Obama being frequently and unironically referred to as both a communist and a fascist, often by the same people.

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By the same token, anything decent CANNOT pertain to the left. There is an unintentionally hilarious interview between David Horowitz and British journalist Nick Cohen, in which Horowitz appears wholly incapable of understanding the notion that a tradition of egalitarianism and rationalism might somehow motivate someone to oppose Islamofascism. The lack of self-knowledge and self-understanding in such attitudes is remarkable.

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Of course, using the term "Islamofascim" in a discussion about misuses of "fascism" is pretty ironic, too.

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Not so you'd notice. Both Hitler and Mussolini were fans of Islam.

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They were fans of Christianity, too (or at least, drew on Christian references when it suited their purposes). Ditto several other religions.

I could just as easily refer to certain extreme branches of Christianity as "Christofascism."

"Fascism," as I thought you understand from your previous posts, has a specific meaning, and it is not just totalitarianism under any given ideology.

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Islam is not Christianity. In fact, it is about as distant from Christianity - especially its central Catholic expression - as any religion can be. It can be argued that it has been built up to be opposed to Christianity, and certainly its central documents are built around a theology that denies the central tenet of Christianity (the mediation of Christ) and attacks Christian ideas by name. Now I know from a certain debate a while back that you are tone-deaf and colour-blind when it comes to religion, but one religion is not like another - not in content, not in organization, not in claims, not in the ground it covers and its sociological impact; and the mere fact that Christianity has no traditional law would be enough to show the difference. Please do not let your anti-Christian animus get in the way of obvious fact.

As for Hitler and Mussolini, they murdered 6000 priests between them, and millions of believers. It is only because their massacre of Jews was even greater that people do not notice how savage their hatred of Christianity was - and how practically effective. They did not murder a single Muslim preacher, and in fact they protected the most murderous specimens, because they both admired the "manly" and "fighting" qualities of Islam. Unlike you, they were perfectly aware of the difference between one religion and another, and loathed Christianity specifically, because of its emphasis on humility and equality. These are all things that are in the evidence and that anyone who made a decent study of Nazism knows. And please don't disgrace yourself with any allusions to "Hitler's Pope" or similar lies - I have dealt with that piece of shit several times over.

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You really shouldn't make assumptions. You're frequently brilliant when writing about history and religion, but you're terrible at inferring the knowledge, motives, and mindset of other people.

I am quite aware of the differences between Islam and Christianity.

When I said that "Islamofascism" is as accurate as "Christofascim," I did not mean Islam and Christianity are the same. I meant that neither Islamic extremism nor Christian extremism can be accurately called "fascism." While they both share many common elements with fascism (as all totalitarian ideologies do), they also differ from fascism in many important ways.

Using the term "Islamofascism" is just buying into the same ignorant mindset you derided above: it was a term coined by rabid ideologues who know little more than that fascism is bad, and therefore attach the label to everything they don't like.

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I have followed the writings both of Robert Spencer and of his enemy Charles Johnson for years. Likewise Daniel Pipes. I know what they say and why they say it. I disagree with both Johnson and Spencer. But to call either of them an "ignorant" ideologue is nonsense. When you can write a commentary to the Qur'an as Spencer can, then you will have the right to comment on his being ignorant or otherwise.

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While I haven't read Spencer's books, I do occasionally read his blog and his columns.

He's very critical of Islam, but I don't recall him ever using the term "Islamofascim," and his criticisms are quite specific. Likewise Daniel Pipes.

But because they are so critical of Islam, they are darlings of David Horowitz and his crowd, who are the ones who propagated the term "Islamofascim."

Now, clearly Spencer and Pipes are willing to go along with the people who butter their bread, which is why Spencer participated in "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week." But I'll bet if you sat him down in private and discussed it, he'd agree that "Islamo-fascism" is an inaccurate pejorative that essentially renders the term "fascist" meaningless.

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I'll bet the opposite. My beef with Spencer is that he does very little indeed to discourage the racists and hate-mongers who make up a considerable amount of his following. I volunteered to be moderator on his site for a few months, and gave up in despair, because the amount of hate, sometimes to genocidal pitch, was simply too much. Spencer may feel, because of his own background, that anything will serve so long as it serves to fight Islam; I do not. And then there is his friend Fitzgerald, the intellectual leader of Jihadwatch, who advocates the expulsion of all Muslims from the West and the transformation of the whole Muslim world into a kind of gigantic ring-fenced Indian reservation; an attitude I find both absurd and criminal. So yes, I do not think that Spencer would greatly object to "Islamo-Fascism". For that matter, Horowitz's arguments for assimilating Islam and Fascism are based on Umberto Eco's account of the Fascist mind, which is arguable but certainly not ignorant. (I wonder what he would do if he realized that Eco is an old-time leftie on the edges of Italian Communism?)

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P.S.: as far as I am concerned, your colour-blindness to religion was established when you joined the group of people who were calling me a "fundamentalist" because I insisted that Christianity was Christianity and not what any person claimed for him/herself. If you insist that a thing can be both itself and its own contradiction, I cannot call your attitude to it perceptive.

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You're incorrect in every respect. You misunderstood me then, you misunderstand me now, and I did not say what you keep saying I said.

If you really want clarification, and not just to rehash the whole argument, PM me. I notice that in public debates, you become increasingly blustery and hostile, no matter the topic, and inevitably it results in dramatic flouncing and defriending, which is why I usually try to avoid arguing with you.

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Heck no. I don't have the time, and I don't think I got you wrong the first time. And as far as I can remember, I was not the one who flounced off in a huff.

....the author is defining "Christianity" as "My personal Christian belief system."....the author has basically written an essay that has more in common, philosophically, with Jack Chick than with any great Christian thinkers. "If you don't believe the way I do, or you write fiction that doesn't conform to my worldview, you are not a Christian" is a statement of personal opinion, and a rather shallow one, not a theological argument.

I hope that, whatever you think, you have by now at least realized that this was so much nonsense, unless you think that I have personally invented Catholicism and Thomism. As for invoking Jack T.Chick... well! When I pointed out - in three long paragraphs - that you had got a number of things wrong, and that I was disappointed to find someone like you lining up on the (at best) Unitarian-Deist side of people who had called me all kinds of names because I took Christianity to be Christianity and not Deism, you accused me of saying that you were ignorant - which is the one thing I had not in fact said or meant - and closed in three sentences flat; which is close to my definition of flouncing off. You showed neither a great understanding of my views nor any great desire to acquire it. So I suggest that you do not charge me with your own sins. Apart from anything else, it makes you look sillier than you ought to be.

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*sigh* Okay, let's do this.

I think reasonable people will disagree on who looked sillier in that exchange. However, I stand by what I said in the above quote, especially this part:

If you don't believe the way I do, or you write fiction that doesn't conform to my worldview, you are not a Christian.

That was my primary objection to your essay: not that I think Christianity is "whatever I say it is," or even that you were necessarily wrong in arguing that the metaphysics of Rowling's universe are inconsistent with orthodox Christianity. But you went from there to concluding that Rowling herself is not a Christian.

Now, first of all, even if everything you concluded about the Christianity or lack thereof in the Potterverse is correct, how do you know that it actually represents Rowling's personal understanding? Have you never heard of authors who are capable of writing about imaginary universes that do not fully reflect their own personal beliefs? I do this myself. So let's say that Rowling deliberately wrote a "non-Christian" universe. Does that make her a non-Christian? Only if, as I implied above, your mindset is like that of Jack Chick, who believes that anyone who fails to express Christianity (specifically, one particular version of Christianity) in everything they do is in fact not a real Christian.

But alternatively, let's suppose Rowling is in fact as theologically ignorant as you assume (and as you assume I am), and that she actually thinks her universe is perfectly Christian. Does that make her not a Christian? No, it makes her like 99.99% of believers in the world, someone with a rather shallow understanding of her own religion, who has never delved much into philosophy and theology. It might make her ignorant, but if believing things that are contradictory to your understanding of Christianity is sufficient to exclude someone from the Real Christians Club, then you must be in a lonely club indeed.

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