http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/ ... ndex2.html
Read this, because this shows as nothing else does (Well, besides one quote from the book that I'll point out in a minute) how little Goldberg understands.
Really, do I HAVE to draw up why that last statement is so incredibly wrong?You've talked about Mussolini remaining on the left and remaining a socialist, and in your book you've got a lot of quotes from the 1920s about that, but I'm wondering -- how does that fit in with what he wrote and said later, especially "The Doctrine of Fascism" in 1932?
I'd need to know specifically what he wrote in "The Doctrine of Fascism." It's been about three years since I've read it.
He says, for example, "Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right ', a Fascist century."
Yeah, I'm perfectly willing to concede there's a lot of stuff Mussolini says, but you've got to remember, by '32, socialism is starting to essentially mean Bolshevism. (My note: Yes, by 1932, The Communist Parties in Germany and Italy were fighting against Communism. Right.) And if you get too caught up in the labels, rather than the policies, you get yourself into something of a pickle. (Because, of course, Stalin was governing EXACTLY THE SAME WAY as Hitler and Mussolini. Right.) The right in Europe back then was authoritarian; the right was a kind of right-wing socialism ... What was dead, according to intellectuals across the ideological spectrum, was 19th century classical liberalism.
But in the book you say, "Mussolini remained a socialist until his last breath," and in 1932 he's writing, "When the war ended in 1919 Socialism, as a doctrine, was already dead; it continued to exist only as a grudge," and he also says, "Fascism [is] the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism."
Yeah, but that's the point. Scientific and Marxist socialism, and certainly the people who subscribed to that stuff, was international socialism. That's what made Mussolini a right-winger, because he was against international socialism and he was for national socialism.
But [Mussolini] never gave up on the program of socialism, he never gave up on this idea that the state was the ultimate arbiter and director of economic arrangements. He never gave up on the idea that the rich should be brought under the heel of the state. And there's this funny thing -- we still live with these categories where nationalism and socialism are supposed to be these opposite things. This is sort of a hangover from the days where socialism was defined as international socialism and nationalism was defined as national socialism. But at the end of the day, nationalism and socialism are essentially the same thing. When we nationalize an industry, we're socializing it. And when we say we want socialized medicine, we're saying we want nationalized medicine. We need to understand that that's the context Mussolini was coming from. (No. Just...no. National Socialism is about government controlling the means of production for the benefit of the businessman - which is why I.G. Farber, Krupp, and the like were not destroyed like Marxists would have done, they were instead coddled and given the benefit of almost unlimited state backing. Communism/Marxism does not treat capitalists well, to note one fairly obvious point. All this proves is that Goldberg just don't get it.)
And he said a lot of stuff. He was sort of a buffoon in that sense; he was constantly changing his definitions of fascism and talking out of one side of the mouth, then out of the other side of his mouth, largely because of the sort of pragmatic idea he had about politics. But in terms of the policies he implemented and where he came to, once again, at the end of his life, he always clung to the policies that were associated with the left side of the political spectrum.
That brings up something else I wanted to ask you -- if I'm reading this right, one of the things you're saying about the student radicals in the 1960s is that they were essentially fascist even if they might have called themselves Marxist.
Yeah.
But isn't it easy to distinguish, since Mussolini repudiated the central doctrine of Marxism?
Well, I mean, I bet you if you gave me an hour I could find places where he once again says nice things about Marxism in 1933 or 1937. (How I WISH the interviewer had given him that hour.)
But he repudiated historical materialism, dialectical materialism.
Yeah. But I think the problem is you get into one of these sort of overly doctrinal, "let's go to the text" approaches where words get confused for things. Stalin never repudiated Marxism, but in almost every way, the checklist for the anatomy of fascism applies to Stalinism ... Saying that you still believe in the dialectic and the cold impersonal forces of history found in "Das Kapital" or "The Communist Manifesto" isn't an abracadabra thing where all of a sudden that means Stalin was really a Marxist or wasn't a fascist in terms of how he actually operated.
Finally, for Dd, I have three quotes from the book.
Jonah Goldberg wrote:Liberal Fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. I don't deny this. Indeed, it is central to my point.
Jonah Goldberg wrote:The white male is the Jew of Liberal Fascism.
That last quote? It's from the frigging BOOK JACKET! Forget the 'reasonable groundwork'. Jonah never made it INTO THE BOOK before he went off the rails. He's a bad writer and a worse historian.Jonah Goldberg wrote:The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
