THE SPECTATOR: James Delingpole talks to Jonah Goldberg about his book on the affinities between the modern Left and the totalitarian movements of the 20th century
Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is a conservative’s wet dream. No, it’s better than that. The moment you read it — presuming you’re right-wing, that is — you will experience not only a rush of ecstasy, but also a surge of revolutionary fervour and evangelical zeal. You’ll want to email all your friends and tell them the wonderful news: ‘I’m not an evil bastard, after all!’
What Goldberg very effectively does is to remove from the charge sheet the one possible reason any thinking person could have for not wanting to be right-wing: viz, that being on the right automatically makes you a closet fascist/Nazi scumbag. By accumulating a mass of historical evidence so extensive it borders on the wearisome, Goldberg comprehensively demonstrates that both Nazism and fascism were phenomena of the Left, not of the Right.
The book, a New York Times No. 1 bestseller has, needless to say, enraged lefties (‘liberals’ as they’re more usually known in the States) everywhere. ‘In the first week I had half a dozen emails from total strangers saying, “How dare you accuse us caring liberals of being fascists!” and then going on to say what a shame it was that my family hadn’t been sorted out once and for all a few years back in the concentration camps,’ he says.
Goldberg is a New York Jew and growing up as a conservative in Manhattan’s impeccably liberal, Jewish Upper West Side, he said he often felt like a Christian in Ancient Rome. At school and university, whenever he spoke in favour of tax cuts or a free market economy, the response was invariably the same. ‘Nazi’, he was called. Or ‘fascist’. By the time he was established as a contributing editor to National Review, he’d had quite enough of this. He spent four years researching and writing the book which would put the record straight.
What he found astonished him. Nazism and fascism, it turned out, were closer kindred spirits of Soviet communism than he could ever have imagined. The first expressed itself through ideas about racial purity and Jew-hatred, the second with ideas about the primacy of the nation, but in most other respects they were all remarkably similar: seizing the means of production; empowering the masses; rule by experts; the elevation of youth and brute emotion over wisdom, tradition and intellect; the submission of the individual to the will of the state. As Goldberg wryly puts it, ‘The Nazis were not big on property rights and tax cuts.’ >>> James Delingpole | Wednesday, February 25, 2009
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