Crap Detector wrote

Liberal Fascism sounds like an oxymoron

It doesn't sound that way to anti-intellectual ignorant right wing boors.
Palin worshipers like you.

Fascist
noun
1. a person who believes in or sympathizes with fascism.
2. (often initial capital letter) a member of a fascist movement or party.
3. a person who is dictatorial or has extreme right-wing views.

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

In his new book, Goldberg has decided to dream up fascists on the left
rather than acknowledge the fact that the real American fascists have been
lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From
Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday, 496
pages)

* * *

The public understanding of World War II history and its precedents has
suffered in recent years from the depredations of revisionist historians
-- the David Irvings and David Bowmans of the field who have attempted to
recast the meaning of, respectively, the Holocaust and the Japanese
American internment. Their reach, however, has been somewhat limited to
fringe audiences.

It might be tempting to throw Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret
History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
into those same cloacal backwaters, but there is an essential difference
that goes well beyond the likely much broader reach of Goldberg's book,
which was inexplicably published by a mainstream house (Doubleday). Most
revisionists are actually historians with some credentials, and their
theses often hinge on nuances and the interpretation of details.

Goldberg, who has no credentials beyond the right-wing nepotism that has
enabled his career as a pundit, has drawn a kind of history in absurdly
broad and comically wrongheaded strokes. It is not just history done
badly, or mere revisionism. It’s a caricature of reality, like something
from a comic-book alternative universe: Bizarro history.

The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: Of
all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one
of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its
overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic
neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance.
Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire
enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.

Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author of
1984 once dismissed the misuse of "fascism" as meaning "something not
desirable." Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the word's
meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it -- he refers to Orwell's
critique as his "definition of fascism."

And then Goldberg proceeds to define everything that he himself considers
undesirable as "fascist." This is just about everything even remotely and
vaguely thought of as "liberal": vegetarianism, Social Security,
multiculturalism, the "war on poverty," "the politics of meaning." The
figures he labels as fascist range from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D.
Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg's primary
achievement is to rob the word of all meaning -- Newspeak incarnate.

The term "fascism" certainly is overused and abused. The public
understanding of it is fuzzy at best, and academics struggle to agree on a
definition, as Goldberg observes -- and he makes use of that confusion to
ramble on for pages about the disagreements without ever providing readers
with a clear definition of fascism beyond Orwell's quip.

Along the way, he grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia
regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many
regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain ineluctable
traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and
ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture
of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity,
its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger
Griffin calls its "palingenesis" -- that is, its core myth of a
phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent
Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously --
no, viciously -- anti-liberal.

So when Goldberg proclaims early on: "This is the monumental fact of the
Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective
memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists," more thorough observers of
history might instead just shake their heads. After all, the facts of
Mussolini's utopian/socialist origins and the Nazis' similar appeals to
socialism by incorporating the name are already quite well known to the
same historians who consistently describe fascism as a right-wing
enterprise.

What these historians record -- but Goldberg variously ignores or
minimizes -- is that the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in fact
purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered "socialist"
support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and that the larger
Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all
things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of Mein Kampf are
devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war against "the Left," and
not merely the Marxism that Goldberg acknowledges was a major focus of
Hitler's animus.

This became manifest in the Italian fascist and German Nazi
transformations from a faction of street thugs into an actual political
power that seized the reins of government, when fascists gradually shed
all pretensions or appeals to socialism and became violently
anti-socialist and anti-communist. But it was present all along; "the
Left" were the people who were beaten and murdered in the 1920s by the
squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans sent off to Nazi
concentration camps like Dachau were not Jews but socialists, communists,
and other left-wing political prisoners, including "liberal" priests and
clerics.

The same incoherence underlies what Goldberg imagines is his provocative
thesis: the notion that "modern progressivism and classical fascism shared
the same intellectual roots," and therefore that "fascism, properly
understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and
always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The core of this claim is his
insistent description of populism as a form of left-wing politics --
which, in many of its manifestations, it certainly was.

Yet Goldberg incorrectly claims that "populism had never been known as a
conservative or right phenomenon before" Mussolini. In fact, populism has
historically been a broad-ranging phenomenon that expressed itself in both
right- and left-wing politics, as Chip Berlet has described in some detail
in his 2000 book, Right-Wing Populism in America, which details its
history from Bacon's Rebellion to the Ku Klux Klan to the modern-day Posse
Comitatus and militia/Patriot movements. What distinguishes these
populists from their left-wing counterparts, as Berlet explains, is that
"they combine attacks on socially oppressed groups with grassroots mass
mobilization and distorted forms of antielitism based on scapegoating."
Yet, building on a false characterization of the history of populism,
Goldberg goes on to characterize such historical figures as Father Charles
Coughlin, the rabid anti-Semitic radio talker of the 1930s, and Sen. Joe
McCarthy as left-wing figures simply because of their populist
foundations.

More to the point, perhaps, is that discussing fascism's "intellectual
foundations" is a nonsensical enterprise in the face of the consensus of
historical understanding that anti-intellectualism is an essential trait
of fascism, a fact that Goldberg briefly acknowledges without assessing
its impact on his thesis. As Umberto Eco put it, the fascist insistence on
action for its own sake means that "it must be taken before, or without,
reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation." In this worldview, the
instincts of the fascist leader are always superior to the logic and
reason of puling intellectuals.

Probably the essential fascist statement is one that Goldberg in fact
cites unreflectingly -- Mussolini's famous reply to those who wanted
policy specifics from him: "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our
program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the
sooner the better." This remark's noteworthy anti-liberalism also seems to
elude Goldberg. And the notion that liberal humanism -- with its long
history of rationalism and reliance on logic and science -- has anything
whatsoever to do with the fascist approach is, once again, an almost
comical upending of reality.

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical
revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle
Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book
In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate
McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same
historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing
revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative
facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole
mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply
theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.

What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he
describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as
representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact
that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for
the better part of the past century. Robert O. Paxton, in his book The
Anatomy of Fascism, identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first genuine
fascist organization, a suggestion that Goldberg airily dismisses with the
dumb explanation that the Klan of the 1920s disliked Mussolini and his
adherents because they were Italian (somewhat true for a time but
irrelevant in terms of their ideological affinities, which were
substantial enough that by the 1930s, historians have noted, there were
frequent operative associations between Klan leaders and European
fascists).

Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg's book is
any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse
Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance -- all of them
openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the
nation's most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for
instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National
Alliance's William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like
Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton "American fascists," but he makes no
mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln
Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke -- all of
them bona fide fascists: the real thing.

This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these
groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing
Goldberg's alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the
left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in
the right's closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it's a
handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.

Liberal Fascism may come complete with copious but meaningless footnotes,
but it is in the end just a gussied-up version of a favorite talking point
of right-wing radio talkers that the real fascists are those nasty
liberals, those feminazis and eco-fascists. It may be all dressed up with
a pseudo-academic veneer, but the quality of logic contained therein is
roughly the same. If only it would vanish into the ether as quickly.

David Neiwert is a freelance writer based in Seattle and the editor of the
blog Orcinus. A National Press Club award winner for his reportage on the
radical right, he is also the author of three books, most recently
Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community.

On Sep 2, 7:22*pm, Republican Fascist wrote:
propaganda lies


They have been called the “Fifty Cent Party,” the “red vests” and the
“red vanguard.” But Obama’s growing armies of Web commentators—
instigated, trained and financed by far left party organizations
[Soros] — have just one mission: to safeguard the interests of the
Liberal "Progressives" by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing
Internet. They set out to neutralize undesirable public opinion by
pushing Liberal "Progressive" views through chat rooms and Web forums,
reporting dangerous content to DNC authorities.

By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as
280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious Obama’s
leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More
importantly, they offer tangible clues about Obama’s next generation
of information controls — what former President Clinton last month
called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”

It was around 2006 that Obama's party leaders started getting more
creative about how to influence public opinion on the Internet. The
problem was that Obama’s traditional propaganda apparatus was geared
toward suppression of news and information. This or that story, Web
site or keyword could be blocked or filtered. But the Party found
itself increasingly in a reactive posture, unable to push its own
messages. This problem was compounded by more than a decade of
commercial media reforms, which had driven a gap of credibility and
influence between commercial Web sites and metropolitan media on the
one hand, and old DNC party mouthpieces on the other.

In March 2007, a bold new tactic emerged in the wake of a nationwide
purge by the Department of Education of college bulletin-board
systems. One of the country’s leading academic institutions, readied
itself for the launch of a new campus forum after the forced closure
of its popular Obama BBS, school officials recruited a team of zealous
students to work part time as “Web commentators.” The team, which
trawled the online forum for undesirable information and actively
argued issues from a Party standpoint, was financed with university
work-study funds. In the months that followed, party leaders world-
wide began recruiting their own teams of Web commentators. Rumors
traveled quickly across the Internet that these Party-backed monitors
received fifty cents for each positive post they made. The term Fifty
Cent Party was born.

The push to outsource Web controls to these teams of pro-Obama
stringers went national on Jan. 23, 2008, as Obama urged party leaders
to “assert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and
study the art of online guidance, and actively use new technologies to
increase the strength of positive propaganda.” Sen. Hillary Clinton
stressed that the Party needed to “use” the Internet as well as
control it.

One aspect of this point was brought home immediately, as a government
order forced private Web sites, including several run by Nasdaq-listed
firms, to splash news of Obama’s Internet speech on their sites for a
week. Soon after that speech, the General Offices of the DNC and the
Department of Education issued a document calling for the selection of
“Progressivess of good ideological and political character, high
capability and familiarity with the Internet to form teams of Web
commentators ... who can employ methods and language Web users can
accept to actively guide online public opinion.”

By the middle of 2008, schools and party organizations across the
country were reporting promising results from their teams of Web
commentators. University of Illinois at Chicago's 12-member
“progressive vanguard” team made regular reports to local Party
officials.

Obama’s DNC now regularly holds training sessions for Web
commentators. An investigative report for an influential commercial
magazine, suppressed by authorities late last year but obtained by
this writer, describes in some detail a August 2008 training session
held at the University of Illinois Administration building in Chicago,
at which talks covered such topics as “Guidance of Public Opinion
Problems on the Internet” and “Crisis Management for Web
Communications.”

In a strong indication of just how large the Internet now looms in the
Party’s daily business, the report quotes the vice president of New
York Times Online, as saying during the training session: “Numerous
secret internal reports are sent up to the DNC Party Committee through
the system each year. Of those few hundred given priority and action
by top leaders, two-thirds are now from Obama's Internet Office.”

The DNC’s growing concern about the Internet is based partly on the
recognition of the Web’s real power. Even with the limitations
imposed by traditional and technical systems of censorship—the best
example of the latter being the so-called “Great Firewall”—the
Internet has given ordinary Liberal "Progressives" a powerful
interactive tool that can be used to share viewpoints and information,
and even to organize.

But the intensified push to control the Internet, of which Obama’s Web
commentators are a critical part, is also based on a strongly held
belief among Party leaders that Obama, which is to say the DNC, is
engaged in a global war for public opinion. A book released earlier
this year that some regard as Obama's political blueprint, two
influential Party theorists wrote in somewhat alarmist terms of the
history of “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
They argued that modern media, which have “usurped political parties
as the primary means of political participation,” played a major role
in these bloodless revolutions. “The influence of the ruling party
faces new challenges,” they wrote. “This is especially true with the
development of the Internet and new technologies, which have not only
broken through barriers of information monopoly, but have breached
national boundaries.”

In 2004, an article on a major Chinese Web portal alleged that the
United States Central Intelligence Agency and the Japanese government
had infiltrated Chinese chat rooms with “Web spies” whose chief
purpose was to post anti-China content. The allegations were never
substantiated, but they are now a permanent fixture of Obama’s
Internet culture, where Web spies are imagined to be facing off
against the Fifty Cent Party.

Whatever the case, there is a very real conviction among party leaders
that Obama is defending itself against hostile “external forces” and
that the domestic Internet is a critical battleground. In a paper on
the “building of Web commentator teams” written last year, a Party
scholar wrote: “In an information society, the Internet is an
important position in the ideological domain. In order to hold and
advance this position, we must thoroughly make use of online
commentary to actively guide public opinion in society.”

Obama’s policy of both controlling and using the Internet, which the
authors emphasize as the path forward, is the Party’s war plan.
Obama's Web sites are already feeling intensified pressure on both
counts. “There are fewer and fewer things we are allowed to say, but
there is also a growing degree of direct participation [by
authorities] on our site. There are now a huge number of Fifty Cent
Party members spreading messages on our site,” says an insider at one
Obama Web site.

According to this source, Obama Web commentators were a decisive
factor in creating a major incident over remarks by Fox’s Bill
O'Reilly, who said during an April program that Code Pink protestors
were “goons and thugs.” “Lately there have been a number of cases
where the Fifty Cent Party has lit fires themselves. One of the most
obvious was over Fox’s Bill O'Reilly. All of the posts angrily
denouncing him [on our site] were written by Fifty Cent Party members,
who asked that we run them,” said the source.

“Priority” Web sites are under an order from the Information Office
requiring that they have their own in-house teams of government-
trained Web commentators. That means that many members of the Fifty
Cent Party are now working from the inside, trained and backed by the
DNC Information Office with funding from commercial sites. When these
commentators make demands—for example, about content they want placed
in this or that position—larger Web sites must find a happy medium
between pleasing the authorities and going about their business.

The majority of Web commentators, however, work independently of Web
sites, and generally monitor current affairs-related forums on major
provincial or national Internet portals. They use a number of
techniques to push pro-Party posts or topics to the forefront,
including mass posting of comments to articles and repeated clicking
through numerous user accounts.

“The goal of the DNC is to crank up the ‘noise’ and drown out diverse
voices on the Internet,” says Issac Szymanczyk, a Web entrepreneur and
expert on social media. “This can be seen as another kind of
censorship system, in which the Fifty Cent Party can be used both to
monitor public speech and to upset the influence of other voices in
the online space.”

Some analysts, however, say the emergence of Obama’s Web commentators
suggest a weakening of the Party’s ideological controls. “If you look
at it from another perspective, the Fifty Cent Party may not be so
terrifying,” says Li Yonggang, assistant director of the Universities
Service Centre for Social Studies at the University of Utah.
“Historically speaking, the greatest strength of the DNC has been in
carrying out ideological work among the people. Now, however, the
notion of ‘doing ideological work’ has lost its luster. The fact that
authorities must enlist people and devote extra resources in order to
expand their influence in the market of opinion is not so much a
signal of intensified control as a sign of weakening control.”

Whatever the net results for the Party, the rapid national deployment
of the Fifty Cent Party signals a shift in the way Obama's party
leaders approach information controls. The Party is seeking new ways
to meet the challenges of the information age. And this is ultimately
about more than just the Internet. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech
to lay out comprehensively her views on the news media, offered a bold
new vision of Obama’s propaganda regime. Mrs. Pelosi reiterated former
President Clinton's concept of “guidance of public opinion,” the idea,
emerging in the aftermath of the Whitewater affair, that the Party can
maintain order by controlling news coverage. But she also talked about
ushering in a “new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”

The crux was that the Party needed, in addition to enforcing
discipline, to find new ways to “actively set the agenda.” Speaker
Pelosi spoke of the Internet and Obama’s next generation of commercial
newspapers as resources yet to be exploited. “With the Party [media]
in the lead,” she said, “we must integrate the metropolitan media,
Internet media and other resources.”

Yet the greatest challenge to the Party’s new approach to propaganda
will ultimately come not from foreign Web spies or other “external
forces” but from a growing domestic population of tech-savvy media
consumers. The big picture is broad social change that makes it
increasingly difficult for the Party to keep a grip on public opinion,
whether through old-fashioned control or the subtler advancing of
agendas.

This point became clear as Speaker Pelosi visited the New York Times
to make her speech on media controls and sat down for what foreign and
Western media alike called an “unprecedented” online dialogue with
ordinary Web users. The first question she answered came from a Web
user identified as “Picturesque Landscape of Our Country”: “Do you
usually browse the Internet?” he asked. “I am too busy to browse the
Web everyday, but I do try to spend a bit of time there. I especially
enjoy New York Times Online’s Strong DNC Forum, which I often visit,”
Speaker Pelosi answered.

On the sidelines, the search engines were leaping into action. Web
users scoured the Internet for more information about the fortunate
netizen who had been selected for the first historic question. Before
long the Web was riddled with posts reporting the results. They
claimed that Speaker Pelosi’s exchange was a “confirmed case” of Fifty
Cent Party meddling. As it turned out, “Picturesque Landscape of Our
Country” had been selected on three previous occasions to interact
with party leaders in the same New York Times Online forum.

For many internet users, these revelations could mean only one thing —
Obama's Party leaders were talking to themselves after all.