I remember as a youngster being puzzled by a common mob punishment in the Western world: tarring and feathering. Okay, being covered with feathers was ridiculous, but surely it wasn't as big a deal as all that!
Then my history teacher opened my eyes. Think of the tar as like napalm, he told me. It was boiling hot; victims were not only burned, they were permanently marked with scars. Feathering simply added insult to injury, although the "feathers" also commonly included barnyard straw, dung, and other filth that practically guaranteed an infection.
Imagine, then, that an entire community—an entire philosophy—undergoes this brutal mob punishment. Further, there is no defense allowed; hands are tied and mouths stopped. The final injustice? The mob applying the tar and feathers are themselves guilty of the offense being punished. Their victims are not.
There are Nazis still among us, I know. Not all of them post on white supremacist blogs or wear swastikas. Some of them are more like the bearded ladies in the stoning mob in Monty Python's Life of Brian, masquerading in virtue as they cast their stones.
D'Souza's book documents the many ways in which the American progressive, socialist and communist left turns this accusation upon their political opponents, despite the long history of support, acceptance—even adoption—of Nazi and fascist thought by the left. In this inversion, defending any non-left political philosophy becomes, in and of itself, a proof of "fascism."
Mussolini and Hitler became “right-wingers,” and the people who supposedly brought them to power became “conservatives.” The Left, then, became the glorious resisters of fascism and Nazism. To make this story work, fascism and Nazism had to be largely redefined.
We accept that actual Nazism is vile, because we agree that the actions and accomplishments of the Nazi regime in Germany were largely vile. We accept that fascism was foul, to the extent that it supported and agreed with the goals of German Nazism during the Second World War. Without knowing the history of these philosophies in the USA, we are in danger of agreeing that violence to suppress these evils here, now, is a good thing.
D'Souza reveals that these current-day violent suppressors of Nazi and facist evil are themselves the actual successors to the mid-twentieth century Nazi, fascist thugs, and their violence is just the latest incarnation of that evil we thought we won against in WWII.
John Locke says that whatever other tasks a government undertakes—whether humanitarian or otherwise—its primary duty is to protect its own citizens from foreign and domestic thugs. That isn’t fascism; it’s classical liberalism. [Emphasis mine]
Let's have an end of defending against this calumny by saying it's "the pot calling the kettle black." It is more a case, as D'souza's careful scholarship shows, of the pot calling the bone china black.
Liner Quotes:
In the German camps and on the Democrat-run plantations, forced labor was employed with “human tools” solely with regard to productivity and with little if any regard for the lives of the workers who were, in both cases, considered inferior and even subhuman. The analogy between two of the worst compulsory confinement and forced labor systems in human history is not merely legitimate; it is overdue.
[The Nazi platform included] universal free health care and education. If you read the Nazi platform without knowing its source, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you were reading the 2016 platform of the Democratic Party.
H[itler] admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West, and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.
Democrats like Senator John C. Calhoun insisted slavery was a “school of civilization” although it was apparently not a school from which anyone was intended to graduate.
[A]nother refugee from Nazism who nevertheless in his youth worked with the Nazis and now directs, in much the same manner Mussolini and Hitler did in their early days, his own private militia. Note that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, but this guy does. With him, as with Marcuse, fascist thuggery derives its moral legitimacy and public respectability from a fake anti-fascist pose. His name is George Soros.
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