You can't give Bin Laden a hug

The Australian ^ | August 10, 2009 | David Burchell

[Schnucki]

A MERE 60-odd years on, World War II still haunts us like a livid vision out of a waking dream. Three generations after fascism annihilated itself in the manner of a suicide-bomber, Leftists and conservatives still wrestle for the laurel of true anti-fascist. Even today our bright-eyed Judeophobes know that they must transfer the shame of the Holocaust elsewhere before they can set about the unsubtle business of depicting Israelis as the modern Nazis. And our open-hearted efforts to "understand" our own era's grand-operatic reactionaries - flint-eyed jihadis such as Indonesia's Noordin Mohammed Top, or the cynical corridor-lurkers of our own suburban mosques - are dogged by the bad conscience of their distant ancestors, the Brownshirts and Blackshirts of the West's own secular-jihadist moment.

As it happens, our urge to understand this alienated "other", the better to stop them hating us, is also in large measure an accidental legacy of the Good War. If today we're all amateur shrinks at heart - with fragile selves that break asunder like porcelain vases in our dreams, and then defy our efforts to glue them back together - that has less to do with our steady diet of Hollywood talky-talk than it does with the mundane needs of the US military during World War II.

Needing to patch together its war-ravaged soldiers before their return to civvy street, the US army of the 1940s created a new kind of mass-production line, this time in group therapy. In the process they funded a vast job-creation program for shrinks, which in turn fuelled the postwar boom in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and general psychobabble. (The process is recorded in a marvellous wartime documentary by John Huston, filmed in New York's Mason Hospital.)

This mass-industrialisation of psychiatry produced a range of civilian spin-offs. Similar methods were used to

[rlmorel]

"...Leftists and conservatives still wrestle for the laurel of true anti-fascist..."

Geez. They do? Count me as surprised. If leftists have done one single thing against fascism and tyranny to make it a wrestling match with conservatives, I would like to hear about it.

[ansel12]

America, what is it’s role in this story?

[SampleMan]

Aligning the political spectrum is quite easy. Its about state control. The more state control you want, the farther to the left you go. It matters not how you arrange the administrative files in your system.

How the fascists ever got tagged for being “Far Right” is beyond me. A real propaganda win for the leftist media. The NAZI’s were not as far to the Left as the Soviets, but then they hadn't been in control as long.

[Jonny foreigner]

How the fascists ever got tagged for being “Far Right” is beyond me. A real propaganda win for the leftist media. The NAZI’s were not as far to the Left as the Soviets, but then they hadn’t been in control as long.

---

this is because of the fact that Europe and the US have a differnt view of what it means to be “left” and “right”. In Europe the NSPAP is viewed as a far right wing party (even it contains the word “socialist”). in the US the view is different.

[Jonny foreigner]

ups of course it´s called NSDAP.

[Albion Wilde]

"When it comes to jihadism, then, it often seems as if we're still channelling Dean's parents in Rebel Without a Cause. We've tried our best, goodness knows. But we know, deep down, that the whole terrorist mess must somehow be our fault, and we'd give anything to make the national family feel happy and complete again. This way of thinking about the matter gratifies us emotionally. After all, as any pop-psychologist knows, to get inside the mind of those who profess to hate us is to demonstrate superior powers of empathy, even some tincture of that moral saintliness demanded of the thoroughly modern parent."