[FoRK] Right-wing propaganda equating fascism with the left

[Jeff Bone]

Speaking of asses and the Republic(ans) --- what, weren't we? --- has  
anybody had a chance to read _Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of  
the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning_ by  
Jonah Goldberg?  This is becoming the right-wingnuts equivalent of  
The God Delusion --- a book that becomes a rallying point.  Over the  
last couple of weeks it's been talked up on every right-wing media  
outlet I sample.

And *I think* it's entirely without irony that they're trying this  
revisionism --- I think that Mr. Goldberg (Emmanuel Goldstein?)  
actually believes his own line of BS, rather than merely and  
cynically making yet another attempt to make every day "Opposite Day."

But it's interesting (or rather, infuriating) how hypocritical these  
right-wing assholes are.  While ordinarily denouncing anything that  
smacks of academia or intellectualism, in this case it's *their* pet  
(psuedo-) intellectual producing agit-prop that conforms the The  
Party Line.  So that's okay.

Goldberg gets some things right:  indeed, there is a kind of tyranny  
inherent in political correctness.  But to try to identify "fascism"  
with liberalism historically --- to try, in whatever tortured way, to  
stitch together a history that pushes the evil of oligarchic public- 
corporate fascism (the Mussolini kind) left of center --- is an act  
so outrageous that it should incite riots among historians.

Of course, it won't.  We've become numb to even the most audacious of  
untruths.  That, more than anything else, will be the legacy of this  
President and his party.


jb