Nazi apologist Jonah Goldberg has hung the "Going Out Of Business" sign at Jonah's All You Can Eat Buffet of Stupid at the National Review.
Jonah claimed that Obama's a Fascist, but Hitler sort of wasn't a Fascist, which did two things - it made it OK to compare Obama with Hitler, and it made the case that Hitler wasn't really a bad guy.
Consider this quisling stupidity from Jonah
Dec 06, 2008
Was Hitler Racist? I'm not sold. Hitler was very inconsistent about lots of things, but he was certainly a consistent anti-Semite....I don't think anti-Semitism is necessarily racist.
Jonah did you the parts about "mongrel races" in Mein Kampf?
Goldberg's output started to decline when he said the NeoNazi who shot up the Holocaust museum was a liberal.
Jonah also claimed wingnuts weren't carrying swastika signs, then he made excuses for the swastikas.
Jonah helped make it OK for wingnuts to picket town hall with swastikas because they are supposedly ironic swastikas. He has also brought the secessionists, hard core racists, and Holocaust deniers out of the closet and into the drivers seat of the GOP.
Jonah also emerged as a prominent part of a larger Nazi apologist movement trying to rebrand Hitler as a misunderstood eccentric who was not a "Fascist," making it unfair to brand the wingnut fringe as "Fascists" merely because most of their beliefs are lifted chapter and verse from Mein Kampf.
Jonah's tortured rewriting of history neatly dovetails with a long tradition of Nazi apologists and Hitler apologists over on the right, as we saw with Pat Buchannan's piece "Did Hitler Really Want War?" Cue the "Leave Britney Alone" kid for the "Leave Adolph Alone" remix.
Let's read Jonah's farewell:
The book’s success in every respect was more than I could have hoped. Long time followers of this project will recall that the book was attacked years before it even came out......
Also, in the current issue of NR I have a short item on the recent spate of "Obama as Hitler" epithets being thrown around by a few people on the Right (and a lot of idiot Larouchies). A link is unavailable....
bold move Jonah
...but here’s the relevant passage:
The simple truth is that I do not think it is in the cards for America to go down a Nazi path. I never said otherwise (why does Jonah still write like he's in high school?) Liberal Fascism, either....
Well gee, Jonah, despite your good ententions, you have become the intellectual hero of some profoundly stupid people, like these sad little drones over at Redstate with their Obama/Hitler/Mussolina collage.
Maybe Jonah's readers were confused by passages like this description of Obama:
A self-proclaimed "transformative" leader formed a self-declared "movement," powered in large measure by a sense of historical destiny ("This is the moment!"), yearning for national restoration ("We will make this nation great!"), demanding national unity at all costs, and glorifying itself for its own youthful energy. At times his most conspicuous followers were blindly devoted to a cult of personality with deeply racial undertones and often explicit appeals to messianic fervor.
Maybe Jonah did not mean Obama specifically, maybe it was just a generic smear that be hurled at any candidate with greater charisma than John McCain.
Quisling Jonah continues to weasel:
....Indeed, while I don't think it is remotely right or fair to call Obama a crypto-Nazi (if by that you mean to say he's a would-be Hitler), the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people.
I would have loved to hear the Passover conversation with the extended Goldberg family, about how the Jews who voted for Obama are actually Fascist sympathizers that are part of the oppressive racism that is grinding down white Americans. I bet some dishes were thrown over that idea, given that this was exactly what Hitler accused the Jews of doing to the Aaryans!
But here Jonah is acknowledging the failure of his goal - to rationalize the claim that liberals are "Fascists," but not exactly like Nazis, but the Nazis weren't really Fascist either. Which is muddled and stupid to begin with, and unfortunately his readers don't really grasp intellectual ambiguity. As predictably as electricity seeking a ground, his readers made the mental short circuit:
Liberals = Nazis
Yep, black Nazis, Jewish Nazis, single mother Nazis. And then the wingnut fringe got all liquored up and the white folks started marching with swastikas!
Jonah sticks close to the heart of his thesis, that the important thing is not to bicker about who killed who, it's all about the dysfunctional family argument of who's "nicer" or who "cares more."
In Jonah's book, it's not about who did bad things, it's all about who can come up with the smarmiest excuse. It's the "I wouldn't hit you darling except that you make me so angry, but that's just because I love you so much." So Jonah isn't about to criticize the Nazis if he can find the slimmest rationalizations for their behavior. And since the Nazis weren't really big on excuses and went right for the in-your-face psychosis, Jonah is obliging enough to manufacture excuses for them on the spot. It's all in a day's work for Nazi apologist Jonah Goldberg.
That's all true, but misses an important point. What the fascists were or are primarily known for is not necessarily dispositive to the question of what they actually were.
What they were "known for" was preemptive war based on hysterical xenophobia, violent suppression of intellectual inquiry; hatred of multicultural or bilingual anything, gays, mixed marriages, trades unions, contraception, the "liberal press," the "Democrats," and well all the usual GOP tropes.
But once Jonah get people off the topic of what the the Nazis did, he has lots more running room to tell fairy tales about what they "actually were," because you know it's unfair to judge people on their actions, so we're obligated to judge them based on what they say. Since Nazi propaganda is not really a very good starting point, Jonah does what he does best, fabricate Nazi apologist nonsense:
The Nazis did not rise to power on the promise of bringing war and violence. They just didn't. They rose to power by promising national restoration, peace, pride, dignity, unity and generous social welfare programs among other things including, of course, scapegoating Jews.
Again we see Pat Buchannans theme of Hitler the lamb, Hitler the peacemaker who was provoked to violence. Jonah insists that we judge the Nazis not on all the bad things they but on their stated good intentions, which is really tough because the Nazis were selling a program of political and racial violence from day one. But then Jonah goes on to cherry pick warm and fuzzy stuff from Nazi propaganda, you know the stuff about saving the family farm and things like that.
Jonah gave us an Alice In Wonderland version of Hitler that glosses over facts known to anyone with a passing familiarity with history, and wraps it in pseudointellectual wingnuttery. Hitler was extremely blunt about what he planned to do. Hitler proposed "war on the existing order" that amounted to complete dismantling of German government and civil institutions, he celebrated street level violence as one of the main tools of the Nazi party from the very beginning, he promised absolute intolerance of other viewpoints that would be implemented in every part of society, and he promised a culture of violence from top to bottom.
Reading Goldberg, not only is one struck by his constant apologies for Hitler, but the breathtaking ignorance of it all. Not that Jonah himself is that ignorant, but he is distilling what psychoanalysts call pseudostupidity - the willful and unbridled disregard of any fact or logic in pursuit of short term gain. This is usually part of a package of similar affects like fake outrage that add up to a suite of neurotic defenses. But as a group, people can embrace the mock outrage and suspension of belief. Whether people are in a lynch mob, or claiming that health care reform is plot to kill veterans, or saying that moon landing were a hoax, the suspension of belief and denial of personal responsibility actually becomes easier in the company of others.
So maybe this is what Jonah meant about what the Nazis "were" before he wandered off into the weeds of Nazi apology muttering about Derrida and Foucault. The Nazis "were" the champions of paranoid political fantasies to let people rationalize violence against their neighbors. The Nazis were conspiracy theorists that believed crazy stories about how the Jews ACORN was going to drain the blood of Christian babies use death panels so the mongrel races could kill the White people mongrel races could kill the White people. See that, it's not even necessary to revise the Nazi message for the GOP in 2009 - it's just cut and paste.
Jonah seems to be dimly aware that he has helped make it fashionable for wingnuts to carry swastika signs:
As I've said many times, one naive hope I had for my book was that it would remove the word "fascist" from popular discourse, not expand its franchise. Alas, on that score the book is a complete failure.
No Jonah, you brought Fascism right to the forefront for people who wanted to use your book as a club to beat liberals, the people who want to claim that the greatest threat is not war, but liberal ideas. That is to say that Jonah sought to empower wingnuts with ideas straight out of Mein Kampf.
the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people.
Instead of turning it into a club to beat liberals, your meth addicted audience applies the Fascist label to over 60% of the voters, most Jews, and most blacks. In fact, according to this bunch, the only people who are not Fascists are white guys with swastika signs.
In fact, pretty much the only people that seem to qualify as "Fascists" for Jonah are the sort of people that would complain about bullies waving swastika signs. Those are the real threats according to Jonah.
http://crooksandliars.com/...
God lord, how many times do you have to be beaten senseless by an alcoholic father to realize it is too dangerous to complain there is no food in the house, and it's better to help beat the littlest whiner than to risk getting burned with cigarettes? Attack the complainers, shut them up at all costs....
But it's OK for them to play the victim, which is an essential part of Nazi mythology. The townhall shouters that claim every cop asking them to tone it down is a "Fascist." Not because the cop is clubbing anyone senseless or even being rude.
These are the same sort of people that want to be able to get close to a candidate with loaded guns and claim it is "tyranny" if they can't. So I guess if they can't walk right up to a candidate with a loaded gun, they are entitled to take a shot at him?
Again, Jonah has empowered people who are taking their play right from Mein Kampf, privileged and heavily armed people who are claiming that they are being oppressed by minorities.
How about this guy, complaining about the swastika bullshit at townhall because he's Jewsish, and a woman yell "Heil Hitler" at him? Good job Jonah, helping transform America into a place where rednecks parade with swastikas and people yell "Heil Hitler" at Jews.
http://thinkprogress.org/...
Because when Jonah famously wrote
The quintessential liberal fascist, is not an SS storm trooper. It is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
He seemed to forget that this sort of one-size-fits-all smear of the governments critics was perfected as antisemitic propaganda, and that reviving these tactics ensured that they would be embraced by modern antisemites eager to label the Jews as subversive.
Like this woman telling Barney Frank that he's promoting Nazi policies
Let's grade Jonah on internal consistency
The book’s success in every respect was more than I could have hoped....
Alas, on that score the book is a complete failure.
Poor jonah, to the very end unable to sustain a coherent train of thought.