{"id":148171,"date":"2023-05-28T02:16:02","date_gmt":"2023-05-28T10:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=148171"},"modified":"2023-05-28T05:42:08","modified_gmt":"2023-05-28T13:42:08","slug":"paul-gottfried-right-wing-celebrities-play-fast-and-loose-with-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=148171","title":{"rendered":"Paul Gottfried: ‘Right-wing Celebrities Play Fast and Loose With History’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Gottfried writes<\/a> Dec. 17, 2017: <\/p>\n

\nA new anthology of the writings<\/a> of intellectual historian David Gordon contains a devastating review of Jonah Goldberg\u2019s Liberal Fascism. Reading it reminded me how bad GOP propaganda dressed up as \u201chistory\u201d can really be. <\/p>\n

David takes no prisoners in his acidic analysis of bad books, and I am still eagerly awaiting his savaging of Dinesh D\u2019Souza\u2019s latest attempt<\/a> to treat the Democratic Party as the American version of the German Nazi Party. Needless to say, what I\u2019m complaining about goes well beyond Jonah\u2019s bestseller, although it can\u2019t hurt to begin with this prime example. Gordon shows how many howlers I missed in all my own diatribes against this book. In addition to pushing a badly substantiated comparison between fascists and Nazis (Jonah runs the two together) and Hillary Clinton Democrats, Goldberg fills his stem-winder with errors that even a moderately intelligent editor should have caught. He attributes to worthies Martin Heidegger and Jean-Jacques Rousseau positions that, as Gordon explains, were diametrically opposed to those that these figures actually expressed. One can easily doubt whether Goldberg ever read a word of either thinker. <\/p>\n

He also mistakes the Jacobins during the French Revolution for communists, and has Napoleon battling \u201cthe Austro-Hungarian Empire,\u201d which was not created until 1867. Contrary to Goldberg\u2019s statement, Napoleon was \u201cEmperor of the French,\u201d not \u201cEmperor of France,\u201d since his authority supposedly emanated from the French people. The English Nazi-sympathizer, Unity Mitford, did not \u201chave to leave the country, incensed that Britain would fight such progressive leaders as Hitler.” As Gordon notes, Mitford was in Germany at the time that England declared war<\/a>. She even tried to commit suicide when the two countries went to war against each other and was sent under Hitler\u2019s supervision to a hospital in Munich to be treated and to convalesce. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that Unity viewed Hitler as a \u201cprogressive,\u201d and certainly not in the manner in which American Democrats regarded Hillary Clinton. In the \u201cnotorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment,\u201d fascist Democrats committed a true atrocity when \u201cpoor black men were allegedly infected with syphilis without their knowledge.\u201d No such experiment ever occurred<\/a>, as David explains: \u201cRather men, who already had syphilis were deceived into thinking they were being treated for their illness.\u201d If President Trump sometimes blurts out questionable facts, one comes away from Gordon\u2019s review believing that next to Goldberg, the Donald is a practitioner of scientific method.<\/p>\n

Let me note that such inexcusably sloppy editorializing posing as scholarship has becoming increasingly characteristic of the conservative movement as a media phenomenon. Editorial opinions dressed up as as scholarship and then placed in book form and mass-marketed have become part of the new highbrow conservatism. Sometimes the errors can be easily corrected, for example, when Weekly Standard and National Review ascribe almost exclusive responsibility for World War I<\/a> to a premeditated German plan to conquer Europe. The Craft of International History by the distinguished diplomatic historian Marc Trachtenberg shreds this utterly unfounded view. Not insignificantly, Trachtenberg\u2019s learned tome<\/a> was published by Princeton University. But of course I\u2019m assuming that those who are mired in error want to learn the historical truth. It\u2019s entirely possible they don\u2019t. Going after the Germans for World War I as well as World War II may be good for fund-raising purposes.<\/p>\n

Perhaps one of the most ludicrous examples of the conservative movement\u2019s recent attempt at being sophisticated was an exchange of equally uninformed views by talk show host Dennis Prager and Dinesh D\u2019Souza, on the subject of the fascist worldview<\/a>. The question was whether one could prove that fascism was a leftist ideology by examining the thought of Mussolini\u2019s court philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944). Gentile defined the \u201cfascist idea\u201d in his political writings while serving as minister of education in fascist Italy. He was also not incidentally one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century; and in works like General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act, adapts the thought of Hegel to his own theory of evolving national identity. It would be hard to summarize Gentile\u2019s thought in a few pithy sentences; and, not surprisingly, the Canadian historian of philosophy H.S. Harris devotes a book<\/a> of many hundreds of pages trying to explain his complex philosophical speculation.<\/p>\n

Hey, but that\u2019s no big deal for such priests of the GOP church as Prager and D\u2019Souza. They zoom to the heart of Gentile\u2019s neo-Hegelian worldview in thirty seconds and state with absolute certainty that he was a \u201cleftist.\u201d We have to assume that Prager, D\u2019Souza and the rest of their crowd know this intuitively, inasmuch they give no indication of having ever read a word of Gentile\u2019s thought, perhaps outside of a few phrases that they extracted from his Doctrine of Fascism. Their judgment also clashes with that of almost all scholars of Gentile\u2019s work, from across the political spectrum, who view him, as I do in my study of fascism, as the most distinguished intellectual of the revolutionary right.<\/p>\n

According to our two stars in what has been laughably named \u201cPrager University,\u201d Gentile proves that \u201cfascism bears a deep kinship to today\u2019s Left.\u201d After all, \u201cDemocrat progressives, in full agreement with Gentile, love and push for a centralized state, which manifests itself in stuff like recent state expansion into the private sector.\u201d Among the questions that are left begging are these: \u201cDo the modern Left and Gentile agree on the purpose and functions of the state?\u201d \u201cWould Gentile and Mussolini, who glorified Roman manliness, have rallied to the present Left in its support of feminism and gay marriage?\u201d Did Gentile back in the 1920s favor the kind of \u201cthe stuff\u2019 the administrative state is pushing right now?\u201d The answer to all these questions, which of course wouldn\u2019t be acceptable at Prager University, is an emphatic \u201cno.\u201d Control of the national economy by the Italian fascist state, down until its German-puppet version was established as the Italian Social Republic in September 1943, was about the equivalent of that of New Deal America. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Gottfried writes Dec. 17, 2017: A new anthology of the writings of intellectual historian David Gordon contains a devastating review of Jonah Goldberg\u2019s Liberal Fascism. Reading it reminded me how bad GOP propaganda dressed up as \u201chistory\u201d can really … 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":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t