Sadly, No!

Oh my God:

If only Michael Vick were white, he’d be the ideal martyr for liberal fascist oppression.

“Man, if only I’d read Jonah’s book, I’d be back at the ranch torturing
dogs as we speak! If I could’ve just told the judge about how PETA
hippies are actually just Nazis, he’d’a definitely let me off!”

I’ve got nothing to add to this. The stupid is driving me to despair.

Clif adds:

A similar syllogism would be this:

1. All Nazis liked sex
2. All liberals like sex
3. Therefore, all liberals are Nazis!

I am sure that Jonah’s course studies at Goucher College probably didn’t include even an introductory logic course, so he is no doubt blissfully unaware that this is the syllogistic fallacy called the “fallacy of the undistributed middle.” That is, of course, choice, since Jonah does himself suffer from an “undistributed middle.”

Der Rocketführer adds:

I haven’t even gotten to the bits yet where Jonah says the Nazis were pro-gay-rights! That, my friends, is going to be something to behold.

Gavin adds: The Nazis believed in the right to a juicy burger.

You know, we’re all having such a good time making fun of Jonah Goldberg’s last-minute term paper that it’s easy to forget that the greater world of right-wing inanity keeps on turning. For example, even as we all sit here chatting so amiably about Il Pantloadini’s belief that a desire to include something in one’s diet other than Chee-Tos, Brawndo and Oops! All Berries Cap’n Crunch is indicative of Nazism, there walks in the shadow of the Canadian timber a cur in human shape known as Mark Steyn.

Let’s see what the Lyme Disease is up to lately. Apparently, the Canadian Islamic Congress has filed a human rights complaint against him for no good reason than he’s the second most genocidal Québécois after Ernst Zündel:

The news of the “human rights” complaint over the Maclean’s excerpt of my book has been out there a week or so now, and I’ve had a lot of queries from folks seeking clarification of this and clarifications of that. I think the easiest way to answer them is to put the actual complaints out there. The Canadian Islamic Congress has sought relief from three bodies so far: the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the British Columbia Human Rights Commission and the Ontario Human Rights Commission. These are all in PDF form, so you can tell they’re the real deal.

Because who could possibly fake a PDF document? Only Dan Rather.

We’ll start with the shortest, just in case you’re in a motel in Mexico on a slow dial-up:

Here Mark shows his versatility, tossing in a completely irrelevant bit of beaner-bashing for those who think he’s only capable of being mindlessly racist against Arabs.

Either Dr Elmasry is making the same mistake as Jim Henley and attributing to me the words of Mullah Krekar, or he believes that it’s “Islamophobic” to quote accurately leading European Muslims.

Well, of course it isn’t! Just like it wouldn’t be Christianophobic of me to quote accurately leading American evangelicals:

* Expect confrontations that will be not only unpleasant but at times physically bloody. We will be living through one of the most tumultuous periods of human history. When it is over, I am convinced God’s people will emerge victorious. But no victory ever comes without a battle. (Pat Robertson)

* As we see the Day approaching there’s going to be a cleansing…there’s going to be a purging coming forth…and everyone that’s living under the immorality cover will be brought down, and God’s new breed will come forth. (Bob Jones)

* I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good. (Randall Terry)

* After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism (i.e., multicultural-ism) will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil. (Gary Potter)

* We were here first. You don’t take our shared common values and say they are biased and bigoted. We are the keepers of what is right and what is wrong. (Lou Sheldon)

Surely no one would find that to be Christian-bashing! Or if, for example, I presented some quotes from the Bible:

* If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. (Deuteronomy 13:6-9)

* Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. (I Samuel 15:2-3)

* Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood. (Jeremiah 48:10)

I could go on and on all night, and I’m sure Mark and his conservative friends would never, ever accuse me of taking quotes out of context, or showing bias, or Christian-bashing, because what he is really interested in is…fairness.

I’m just concerned to maintain a level playing field for all phobias, and the biggest obstacle to that are these cockamamie Human Rights Commissions which are an abomination to any free society.

You see, Mark Steyn is a humanitarian — a noble figure, in fact, a tireless defender of our freedoms. He simply wants to ensure that all irrational hatreds and prejudices are given an equal chance to thrive. That his is main area of concern, that there should be no hindrance to bigotry of any kind. But his dream that he will live in a nation where everyone can be misjudged for the color of their skin is being shattered by those enemies of freedom — those abominations — known as ‘human rights commissions’. Yes, in Steynderella’s Castle, the greatest threat to a free society is an agency which works to ensure that people’s civil rights are not being violated. What man can truly say he is imbued with liberty when some ne’er-do-well bureaucrat tries to prevent him from calling someone a sand-nigger? What human being can say with pride that he is a free man when some faceless paper-shuffling cretin won’t let him imprison someone on suspicion of worshiping the wrong god? And as long as the least of us is not applauded for comparing people of different religious or ethnic backgrounds to vermin, aren’t we all in prison?

Huge, huge thanks to all of you who gave to my cash-raisin’ drive to go to CPAC. Y’all went at it like Pam Atlas on a bottle of strawberry schnapps — I’m astonished that in just two days, you donated all but $200 of my goal to get to the Conservative Political Action Conference and make fun of John Bolton’s mustache, once again proving that this site has the best fucking readership on the web. I’m almost at my goal, and if any of you aren’t completely tapped out from the holidays, this will be my final push! Confirmed as appearing at this inhuman stupidity hoedown are Mike S. Adams, Newt Gingrich, Ben Shapiro, George Will, Emmett Tyrell, Doug Giles, Brent “Walter Peck” Bozell, Kevin McCullough, Tom DeLay, and yes, MARK NOONAN. Dudes, seriously, MARK FUCKING NOONAN is going to be there. Won’t you help me stand two feet away from the dumbest man on the planet? Remember, any $ I get over my travel expenses goes straight to the S,N! coffers, and at the very least, Gavin and Brad deserve a nice Christmas present — they’ve spent the last week voluntarily reading Liberal Fascism, so I’m sure they could use a new pair of souls. Thanks as always for your help.

Above: The shoe drops

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Above: The shoe bounces a bit, like a bouncy rubber thing

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So here, as best we can find it, is the central thesis of Goldberg’s book. He’s attempting to define Progressivism (of the historical, capital ‘p’ variety) as a literal fascist movement, so that everything liberals ever do, have ever done, or may do in the future can be identified with figures such as Mussolini and Hitler.

Meanwhile, conservatism skates free and blameless for the conditions that made Progressivism necessary — as well as for being incomparably worse regarding all the late-19th and early-20th-Century faults and enthusiasms that Jonah mentions here. See, that’s why it was called ‘Progressivism’ in the first place: Because the conservative view at the time was that children ought to be working sixty hours a week in meat-packing plants, and so forth.

In fact, we must stare in awe as Jonah accuses Margaret Sanger of “nasty racism” for her era-appropriate belief in eugenics, even while the back cover of his book, to be published in January 2008, sports a blurb by Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve.

Is there even a word for this? Reading this book is like watching a flaming piano fall out of an airplane and land in a puppy farm.

Update: Out of a near-infinitude of possible footnotes, let me arbitrarily choose the fact that Carl Schmitt is indeed popular among left-academics, just as Jonah says. On the other hand, Schmitt is quite a bit more popular among right-academics, and there’s a certain context to his popularity that’s highly relevant to the topic. But of course, what Jonah typed is strictly true in a literal sense. (Jeez-Louise.)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

After work today, I plan on eating a salad, going for a three-mile run and then rounding up my fellow white guys and putting them into camps. It’s the least this liberal fascist can do for The Cause.

Also:

I swear to God, this book is like reading 400 pages of some whiny child shrieking, “But mo-ooooooom, I don’t wanna eat my vegetables, I WANT CAKE CAKE CAKE, it’s not faaaaaa-haaaaay-haaaaay-aaaaaair!!!!”

UPDATE: Yeah, this Jon Swift post deserves another promotion…

Gavin adds:

Above: Idea hiked from Matt Steinglass

UPDATE II: More liberal fascism (my emphasis):

The fastest eco boat on the planet will attempt to break the round the world speed record using fuel made from human fat.

Pete Bethune, the New Zealand skipper of Earthrace, said the attempt to circumnavigate the globe would begin from Valencia in Spain on March 1 next year. […]

Demonstrating further commitment to the cause, Bethune underwent liposuction and donated enough to produce 100ml of biofuel, while two other, larger volunteers also had the procedure, making a total of 10 litres of human fat.

Liberals are now using human fat to power their eco-friendly vehicles. Can death camps for Cheetos-devouring patriots be far behind?

Thanks to the super-cool reader who sent me this amazing political spectrum as told by Jonah’s book:

I know it’s tough to see here (the image is long and I had to fit it onto this post) but that’s HITLERy, Hitler, Joe McCarthy and exercise on the Left, and George Washington, Cheetos and Jack Bauer on the Right.

[Gavin adds: Ever tireless and fixy of pictures around here, I’ve reformatted it so the image is clearly visible. Why yes, since you mention it, they do take me for granted!]

I’m supposed to write a review for this book over the weekend, but I think this graphic captures its essence better than I ever could.

Thanks again, awesome reader!!!

Above: Fried-dough stand at the Carnival of Buncombe

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Believe it or not, we’re about to reach the part where he identifies Progressivism itself as fascist. As in, the end of child labor, the forty-hour work-week, the founding of America’s national parks — in short, all that totalitarian goose-stepping stuff that interferes with the natural order of human society, i.e. feudalism under the ministry of robber barons.

No, I’m not kidding. Yes, it’s really that bad.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Don’t let disease claim your life!

• Having fallen for Kevin Trudeau‘s pseudoscientific flim-flammery, I should like to recommend a technique that can free America of all illness. It’s like an ear candle — for your ass.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Note: The substance that these rubes are swallowing becomes a gel inside their digestive tracts, causing them essentially to defecate molded Gummi intestines.

I think Jonah has noticed how much we love him around here.

Tom Wolfe on Liberal Fascism [Jonah Goldberg]

Since the buzz is starting, I thought Corner readers might be interested in what Tom Wolfe had to say about the book:

“In the greatest hoax of modern history, Russia’s ruling “socialist workers party,” the Communists, established themselves as the polar opposites of their two socialist clones, the National Socialist German Workers Party (quicknamed “the Nazis”) and Italy’s Marxist-inspired Fascisti, by branding both as “the fascists.” Jonah Goldberg is the first historian to detail the havoc this spin of all spins has played upon Western thought for the past 75 years, very much including the present moment. Love it or loathe it, “Liberal Fascism” is a book of intellectual history you won’t be able to put down—-in either sense of the term.”
—Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons

12/18 11:54 AM

But I’m beginning to suspect that he’s not quite sure if our love is real. In fact, I think he’s testing us — playing coy little games to see if this love affair has what it takes to last, or if it’s only a momentary infatuation. How else can you explain things like this?

Frum Pro-Elite, Anti-Populist [Jonah Goldberg]

David Frum has an interesting column on the limits of populism and the upside of elitism. These are two of my favorite themes. And since Huckabee seems to be a champion of the former and a foe of the latter, I thought (in the spirit of bloggy self-promotion) I’d call attention to one of my broadsides against populism and one of my defenses of elitism.

Regardless, I agree with David that populism is a useful and healthy passion when aimed at the liberal elite. But conservatives can get drunk on it when they proclaim that elites are bad simply because they are elites. Conservatives respect authority — the authority of ideas, traditions, morals, religion, customs, reason, law, excellence and so on. One cannot believe in this kind of authority while having a blanket hostility to elitism in any form.

12/18 03:02 PM

Oh, Jonah, you wily scamp! As if the deathless prose of “Vegetarians for Veal: The Carnal History of Herbivores from Siddhartha Gautama to Oscar Mayer” weren’t enough to win our hearts, now you give us this? Who but our own beloved Pantload could make the argument that populism is good when it denigrates fascist liberal elites, but bad when it denigrates conservative real American elites, like him and his friends?

Don’t worry, Jonah. We’re not toying with your affections. Our love is the real thing, baby — as real as that picture of Joe McCarthy and Leon Trotsky playing whist together that I keep in my office. We’ll never quit you.

Now get out of here, you crazy kid!

Heil Hillary!

It gets worse and worse. I can’t bear much more of this:

Jonah has literally taken everyone who ever did anything bad and turned them into a liberal. Why did the Titanic crash? Because it was run by godless liberals who mocked the Lord by calling their ship unsinkable. Why was Janet Jackson’s nipple exposed at the Super Bowl? Because liberals designed her dress to pop open and undermine America’s sacred values. Abu Ghraib? Totally a result of the Left’s perversion of our cultural norms. Why was President Bush so slow to respond to Hurricane Katrina? Because he was playing a guitar, which is the consensus favorite instrument of… LIBERALS!!!

“Kum-bay-yah, m’lord… Kum-bay-yah!”

UPDATE: Oh, I can’t resist… one more:

But remember, he’s totally not saying that Hitlery KKKLiNtoN Hillary Clinton is a Nazi! He’s just saying that Hillary and the Nazis used really, really similar tactics to achieve power, and if people start associating the two because of how eerily similar they are, well that’s not his fault, is it?

Above: He knew human folly like the back palm of his hand — W.H. Auden

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I’m going to add some more commentary in a bit, as well as some more of Goldberg’s argument, but it’s interesting to watch what he’s doing here. We’re a few pages into the book, and he’s isolating the French Revolution from its causes and historical antecedents, and attempting to redefine it as the Protean liberal-fascist moment — as compared to the American Revolution, which was somehow “essentially conservative” within the context of millennia of (usually) hereditary monarchy, followed by a drib of English parliamentarianism. You have to wonder what he’d do with Oliver Cromwell.

Anyway, it’s obvious where he’s getting that hard dichotomy between the French and American Revolutions (it’s an old one, from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution), but watch where he goes with it. (The phrase, “leftists embrace cognitive dissonance and terminological sleight-of-hand” is a lovely exhibit of what poker players call ‘a tell.’)