{"id":136704,"date":"2021-01-22T14:21:49","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T22:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=136704"},"modified":"2021-01-22T14:21:49","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T22:21:49","slug":"paul-gottfried-dont-call-me-the-godfather-of-those-alt-right-neo-nazis-im-jewish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=136704","title":{"rendered":"Paul Gottfried: Don\u2019t call me the \u2018godfather\u2019 of those alt-right neo-Nazis. I\u2019m Jewish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Gottfried writes April 17, 2018<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Robert Fulford\u2019s comments about my political influence (March 10) were illustrated with a picture of an unidentified \u201cman\u201d giving a Nazi salute at a recent event of which I know nothing and headlined \u201cHow the alt-right\u2019s godfather transformed our world (not in a good way).\u201d Fulford writes that I once \u201cnourished thoughts that seemed at best eccentric but now form everyday conversation online.\u201d I am, he says, \u201ca major source\u201d of the alt-right\u2019s \u201cideas and attitudes.\u201d<\/p>\n

These revelations about me omit the fact that I am a Jew, whose cousins were killed by the Nazis. Thus any suggestion that I might be associated with what is depicted as a neo-Nazi movement is especially offensive. This association, moreover, has nothing to do with reality.<\/p>\n

Allow me to call attention to Robert Fulford\u2019s more glaring (and, given his reputation, more disappointing) errors in his depiction of my life and career: I was not a philosophy professor, but a professor of humanities with an endowed chair, who taught among other subjects classical Greek. I didn\u2019t merely spout \u201ceccentric\u201d opinions but produced a substantial body of scholarly literature that has been translated into several foreign languages. George Hawley\u2019s scrupulously researched study Making Sense of the Alt-Right notes that my scholarship on the interwar European right influenced profoundly the American dissident right, among others. Among those who drew selectively from my scholarship was the alt-right figure Richard Spencer. But this hardly proves that I share all of Spencer\u2019s present or even past views. Nor have I been exclusively associated with the right. For years I also published in journals of the left.<\/p>\n

Fulford asks that, since I am apparently a \u201cman of the right,\u201d why not \u201cjoin the traditionally right-wing Republican Party?\u201d<\/p>\n

Here we get to the heart of the problem: Fulford should familiarize himself with what Hawley calls the Old Right position that I\u2019ve defended. This includes opposition to promiscuous foreign interventionism, the National Security State, social engineering, non-traditional mass immigration, and more. Yet these are all policies that Republicans like Mitt Romney, John Kasich, the Bush family and other representatives of this \u201ctraditionally right-wing\u201d party accept.<\/p>\n

Fulford writes that I was \u201cone of those few intellectuals who support Donald Trump.\u201d Indeed, I may have been launched into cosmic significance by that monster. It is true that I once thought that Trump represented a break with the American uni-party consensus and its disastrous policies. I\u2019m not sure about that anymore.<\/p>\n

I do know Richard Spencer and worked with him in 2010 when he edited the Taki\u2019s Magazine website. We did develop the term \u201cAlternative Right\u201d together \u2014 it was a headline he put on one of my articles. But my subsequent strategic differences with him are a matter of public record, which should have been noted.<\/p>\n

I did not attend and had nothing to do with the Aug. 12, 2017, Charlottesville Unite The Right rally that Fulford discusses in the article. Despite my non-involvement, however, I should point out that his retelling of the established media storyline warrants correction: However distasteful we may find some of them, Unite the Right demonstrators had acquired a legal permit to protest peacefully against the dismantling of Confederate monuments. They were assaulted by an \u201cantifa\u201d mob, and police, far from protecting the UTR demonstrators\u2019 rights, were instructed by the police chief to let the two groups fight it out. These facts have been established by the independent Heaphy Report and the police chief has been forced to resign.<\/p>\n

The million-dollar question for me is why Fulford would unfairly associate a Jewish-American scholar of the dissident right by associating me with white supremacists and neo-Nazis. I have read some of Robert Fulford\u2019s earlier journalism with pleasure. My late wife was from Toronto and I spent considerable time there in the 1970s and \u201980s, when Fulford was already a celebrated Toronto author. Given my one-time favourable impression of his work, I trust his unfair attack on me is not characteristic of his recent prose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Gottfried writes April 17, 2018: Robert Fulford\u2019s comments about my political influence (March 10) were illustrated with a picture of an unidentified \u201cman\u201d giving a Nazi salute at a recent event of which I know nothing and headlined \u201cHow … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720,29610],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right","category-paul-gottfried"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136704"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136705,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136704\/revisions\/136705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}