Posted on 03/18/2008 7:31:40 AM PDT by qam1
Compassionate fascism is just as anti-liberty as the other kind
Perhaps you wonder how society's self-appointed hall monitors got the right to make you feel bad about the fries on your plate or the cigarette you're smoking, or outlaw listening to iPods while crossing the street.
If so, you may also be fed up with being nagged about recycling, and be wondering why just because you don't think we're all responsible for global warming, you have been designated a pariah through that infelicitous phrase -- climate-change denier. You know what that's supposed to sound like. Worse, some of your accusers don't merely think you should be prevented from speaking, they think fascists like you should go to jail.
Fascist? You just wanted to be left alone.
Well, there's book for you: Liberal Fascism, by L.A. Times columnist Jonah Goldberg. Rest easy, if you're a live-and-let-live kind of a guy. You're no fascist.
If anybody is, it could be the person calling you one -- one of today's liberal-progressives. Goldberg has done the genealogy of ideas and come up with a provocative contention: People who think it takes a village to raise a child have been sucking on the same philosophical lemon as Benito Mussolini. For liberals, this is going to be like a Klansman finding African American roots in his family tree.
But, their problem is that Goldberg is persuasive: Only the fact we have forgotten what fascism is -- socialism set to patriotic music -- allows today's left to recycle its ideas, while attaching the stigma it earned in the first half of the 20th century to conservatives, or anybody else it hates.
So, what is fascism anyway? And, why does it matter?
I had it explained by a professor who brought a hatchet into the seminar room, and a handful of sticks. The sticks tied around the shaft, he flourished it aloft: "This is a fasces. The sticks are people, the axe is government. If the people are bound tightly to the state, the axe of government can't fall on them. Fasces, fascism. Get it, peabrains?"
That's fine, I suppose, if the axe also represents the will of the people. If it doesn't . . . don't you see why fascism gets a bad name? Which is why it matters that the label is promiscuously applied to discredit whoever objects to the statist power-play of the day: It stifles debate, and is meant to.
Anyway, that prof could not have better distilled Mussolini's view of the totalitarian relationship between state and citizen, a term which Goldberg credits him with originating; a "society where everybody belonged, where everyone was taken care of, where everything was inside the state and nothing was outside."
That almost sounds nice doesn't it? As Goldberg playfully adds, "truly, no child was left behind."
Except that it's also where all the sticks are tied to the axe.
As in Castro's Cuba, or the old USSR. Hence a couple of professional irritations.
If Castro is a textbook fascist, why does the left love him? And, why does hardly anybody get the irony of conservative columnists who advocate free speech and an end to government monopolies in wheat sales and health care, getting called fascists?
There's actually nothing conservative about fascism.
It's a creature of the left. We've forgotten a lot about Nazi Germany, to begin with that Hitler was elected on a socialist, anti-big-business platform. National socialism, remember?
Berlin was also endlessly preachy about health, smoking, animal rights (!) and even organic foods. Goldberg cites a Hitler Youth manual: "Nutrition is not a private matter!"
Sounds like a Canadian apologist for the public-health monopoly, justifying why citizens owe it to fellow taxpayers to get with the wellness program, exercise more and give up fatty foods. "Are you automatically a fascist if you care about health, nutrition and the environment?" asks Goldberg.
No. "What is fascist is the notion that in an organic national community, the individual has no right not to be healthy; and the state therefore has the obligation to force us to be healthy."
Not all fascisms are equal. Not all are even racist. (Whatever his other sins, Mussolini sent no Jews to camps.)
And Goldberg describes anti-liberty U.S. government domestic policy during the First World War -- the arrest of dissenters, loyalty oaths and suppression of free speech -- as a native fascism that prepared the way for the Big Government of the New Deal and all that followed.
But now, we're starting to see where the hall monitors get their religious fervour. North American liberalism, though more nanny than bully, is definitely "totalitarian" -- or holistic if you prefer -- says Goldberg. "Liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists."
A lot of Yanks didn't care for compassionate conservatism. Maybe come November they'll like compassionate fascism better, for that's what they're likely to get.
btt
Click the Pic J
Thank you!!!!
A most excellent article. Thank you for posting it!
That is great!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
