Liberals are the true heirs of the Nazi spirit

Colonial

Guilt? You must be joking. Not amongst most of my friends. Comparisons to Hitler? Nonsense! My father spent four years fighting fascism and two uncles died doing it.

I have, in amazement, watched for years as the Left has destroyed so much of what was good in our society. What I have increasingly wondered is when the reign of these creepy little people will end, why nothing at all is written speculating about it and what will replace it.

GaryO

Where does the BBC fit into this?

GaryO

The clue's in the name for all to see: NAZI = Nationalsozialismus = National Socialism = Lefties

MikeF

The really crucial word in the quote from President Obama is not 'ideology' - it is 'bigotry'. This particular term now has an almost totemistic value for the liberal-left. It is, however,devoid of any worthwhile meaning. Instead it is used reflexively as a catch-all term of abuse to smear anyone who does not follow the line on almost any non-economic issue. No other word lifts the lid so effectively on the ugly, self-referential and self-righteous cast of mind that pervades so much of the left.

Ian Garton

What goes around, goes around.
Pre-Thatcher, the Tory message was exactly that they were better at delivering the nanny state.

Jenny

Sounds great.

I've just ordered a copy.

Ian Garton

Oh, and the other thing I wanted to say. I only finished Nick Cohen's book "What's left" yesterday. It seems to have covered the territory Liberal Left = The New Fascists very convincingly, almost irrefutably. I have spent a lifetime enjoying myself at dinner parties pointing out the anomalies and contradictions within the intelligentsia's flaccid-brained consensus. Cohen put it beautifully in one book. Now I don't know whether to buy Goldberg's. It is possibly more fun to think things out on the fly, without buying ready-made ammo.

David

Could we not use the US meaning of liberal? It's perfectly possible to be right wing and liberal.

CharlieRay15

Or, just to go a little further than GaryO, NAZI = Nationale sozialistische deutsche Arbeiter Partei, or National German Socialist Workers' Party. Which British party has the name that most echoes this description?

Matt

@David. How do you mean? In his book, which I've just started reading, Goldberg distinguishes between the US meaning of 'liberal' and classical liberalism such as that espoused by John Stuart Mill. If anything, with their shared concern for the freedom of the individual, conservatives (whether big or small 'c') and liberals in Britain have a lot of common ground. The poison in the water is the perceived need to be seen as 'progressive'. The Nazis were certainly that.

Goldberg's book is really quite remarkable. Commentators such as Richard Littlejohn have been pointing out for years that one of the favourite tactics of the left is to attempt to shut down the debate on various issues (immigration, for example) by smearing anyone who disagrees with them as a "racist" or a "fascist". Now it turns out that the notion that the Nazis were on the extreme right-wing was a hugely successful communist-sponsored smear.

Plenty of people have remarked before that the political spectrum is a circle rather than a continuum, but Liberal Fascism is a book that should rewrite our notions of right and left - parts of which never made much sense at all.

Only recently I have read comments from people on the Guardian's Cif site to the effect that many of the BNP's policies are to the left of Labour. Perhaps now such apparent paradoxes will be seen for what they are. The notion that "left = good, right = bad" was always moronic. It is dismaying to hear otherwise decent and intelligent people say things like "I could never vote Conservative." It's high time there was a fresh debate informed by a new set of political categories.

Mr Green

Vernon Coleman has been saying this for years. And has written about it too.

Ray

The thing with 'liberals' (and which explains the extraordinary lengths they will go to to undermine those last great citadels against totalitarianism - the church and the family) is that it's not so much liberty that they seek to promote as licence.

Richard

Hannah Arendt covers a lot of the same ground in 'The origins of Totalitarianism'. Michael Burleigh's recent trilogy on religion and politics also traces the historical roots of both Leftwing and Rightwing ideology.
It looks like both are about to disintegrate.

'What rough beast it's hour come round at last...'

seb

Goldberg quotes Alexis de Tocqueville as having written:

"It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones."

De Tocqueville must have been a very prescient thinker to foresee a time when, compelled by the noblest of intentions, our political classes see fit to ban or variously interfere wherever possible with private citizens' enjoyment of food, tobacco, alcohol and, if the brain-dead Harriet Harman gets her way, mercantile sex. It was recently suggested that smoking whilst driving be added to the already massive list of prohibitions in order to make the world an even better place. Bravo!

Goldberg is at pains, in 'Liberal Fascism', to point out that the tendency towards totalitarian and authoritarian micro-management of human existence by progressivists is not in the same league as the genocidal or militaristic fascisms of Hitler or Pol Pot. However, this dismal tendency is a manifestation of the same essential manichaeanism of the [usually tiny] human mind. As other comments have stated, it is, they believe, enough for the progressives to shout down their opponents. They are self-referential and self-righteous, which leads them to the sincere belief that their opponents, being from The Dark Side, have neither a point of view to express nor even the right to self-expression.

Goldberg, I am sure, will soon join Nick Cohen as one of the most reviled specimens of untermensch in the demonology of our bien pensant, preening Left.

Augustus

Notwithstanding popular misconception to the contrary, the degree of a government's tyranny is the degree of its vulnerability, particularly in the sphere of economics. Totalitarian governments, in spite of their outward appearance of unconquerably massive solidarity, are inwardly rotten with ineptitude, waste, corruption, fear, and mismanagement. This must be so, because of the very nature of government control.

Mark Solomon

There is nothing new in any of this - Mussolini was a socialist and Hitler's party was the national socialist party, but all credit to the author if his writing extends knowledge of this overlooked fact. For all their talk, the left have always behaved like Nazis in power and didn't Hitler want to overturn existing society and impose a 'New Order'?

While we are intelligently analysing political roots, can someone PLEASE tell the Americans that liberal does NOT mean Left-wing, that liberal means belief in freedom, free markets and non-state interference (note similarity to word 'liberty'!) and that therefore it is more properly an ideology of the right and not an insult at all.

Manipulation of language is very important to political expression, as George Orwell made clear...

Hugh Jardohn

This was copyright 2007. Where has the U.K. been?

Duc de Blangis

It is the centrality of government per se, in any political philosophy, which determines the extent to which it is left or right-inclined. The problem is not that fascism and Nazism have been ineffectively demonstrated to be leftist ideologies, but rather the limited number of fora in which this view can be effectively espoused.

mesquito

I'm reading the book right now. Excellent. Hitler, he says, combined Left economics with Left identity politics, and we call the result "right wing."

Go figure.

mid-american

Goldberg's was not an original idea.
The liberal (not a conservative) philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in his book "A History of Western Philosophy" that "Both fascism and communism are extremes of liberalism."

harry naasz

Much of the Obama administration's words and actions have reminded me of the truth of Goldberg's Liberal Fascism... Fascism with a smile.

Bill

Ding ding ding ding ding ding. We have a winnar! Great take!

paul

the soviet union and hitlers nazies made a pact invaded poland and started the second world war, control freaks always want to dominate others.

YouCannotBeSerious!

Utter nonsense - so Hitler, Franco and Pinochet were closet socialists were they? They certainly hid it very well - there was Hitler making sure that the first people to be sent to the concentration camps were socialists; Franco massacring his way through the liberal-left as he conquered Spain etc.

The arguments presented here are fallacious - Hitler believed in big government; so do the left; therefore liberals are heirs to Nazis;

Himmler was kind to animals; so are animal rights activists; therefore animal rights activists are the heirs to Himmler.

Nonsense on stilts. Come on the Spectator - there is so much good writing in here, why do you spoil it with sub-6th form debating style arguments like this?

Giles Cattermole

Have a look at the Political Compass page about UK parties: after a steady drift "upwards" (ie, more authoritarian) over the last several years, the situation now is that if Labour got any more left wing it'd be indistinguishable from the BNP.

Matt

Hitler's particular ideology was racist and anti-Semitic - but, as Goldberg points out, there's no reason to think other forms of fascism need be either. The Communists' propaganda coup was to successfully insinuate that racism and/or anti-Semitism were right-wing phenomena. The truth is, they are neither left- or right-wing.

steve

I used to subscribe to the spekkie but gave it up as I realised it was aimed at 6th formers.Every now and then I look it up on Google to confirm I was right to cancel the sub. Glad to see James doesn't disappoint. I can't believe he put so much effort into stating the bleedin' obvious.Can hardly wait to ignore Goldberg's rehash of stuff everybody knows already

Matt Buckingham

Well a business owner in facist Italy would actually have to apply to the state to request how much they could pay themselves! It doesn't sound very right-wing to me! Both Nazism & Facism were high tax economies. Basically, just like communism, all took command of most the money in the economy & spent it. Usually on the military. You could argue that the dimished power of the individual in all regimes, means that the extreme right & left go full circle, which makes them very similar to each other. You could also perceive that they're all left-wing, being a Tory, I'd go along with the latter!

Jimbo

If all the liberals who condemn 'mein Kampf' actually bothered to read it, they'd find it a socialist handbook from start to finish. It even has Hitler describing feeling so sorry for the mice in his army barracks that he feeds them!

elfraed

It certainly is a macro view of things; like counting the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Wacky-pedia :"Conservative" and "Liberal" are contending schools of elitist thought regarding philosophy of government. The former is old-school, Social Darwinist; the latter is new-school, Nanny Statist. Both seek to define themselves in relation to the age-old question, "Am I my brother's keeper?". Both answer in the affirmative.
This had not been an issue for government when most people supported themselves on their own farms. But, with fewer than 3% of the population currently farming, the question arises as to how a people are to maintain their self-reliance, where self-sufficiency is no longer possible. What is the alternative to the communal bonds of small-town life, for sustaining a sense of individual and social responsibility, in an age of global markets and economic insecurity?
Neither political camp has a clue as to how these conundrums may be solved; concentrating instead upon an imposing, aristocratic\exclusive facade on the one side; and engaging in the charade of an egalitarian inclusiveness on the other.
The quibbling between them is due to their approaches, and degrees of involvement in a particular issue at any given time. For example, on the issue of abortion, Liberal politicians won't do anything, whilst the Conservatives don't do anything. On the issue of gun control, the Conservatives won't do anything, whilst the Liberals don't do anything. Both of these examples demonstrate distinct differences between the parties.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQVfH1JrGYc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idv-FGURn9s&feature=related
Wiki-Wacky:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun

Dirty Euro:

The nazis were the first government of the 20th century to start major privitisations. Hitler killed the socialist wing of his party on the night of the long knives.
Most nationalist parties have a right wing left wing within them like the BNP.
The nationalism brings people with totally different economic views together. Hitler killed his left wingers early on. So he was right wing. He had the support of landowners, big business and the army. He was right wing. Plus he left the league of nations, as he saw co-operation between nations as naive.

Killer Point

Why did Hitler support Franco, but not the socialists in Spain?

Odysseus

Mark Solomon,

You won't have to tolerate that much longer. Leftists in America have stopped calling themselves liberals and now call themselves "progressives." So, just read the book's title as Progressive Fascism.

A. MacAulay

Are humans fundamentally good or fundamentally bad? If bad then one needs lots and lots of laws to prevent badness and to chastise the baddies.

If good, then moral leadership should do the most of the job and the chance to let the people do good, not only for themselves but also for their neighbours.

All dictatorships and most of the "Left" believe the former. "Liberals" in the European understanding of the word, adhere to the latter. Conservatives try to maintain a status quo.

This is why the Conservatives have to manage to unite commercial and industrial (liberal) interest with Toryism, and the Labour party has to unite bossy, invasive statism with social responsibilty. Easy really.

P.S. Hitler and his band of criminals could kidnap the largest European economy after defeating the bolsheviks on the streets because the were supported by the anti-democratic, anti-Weimar Right, including the Prussianised military and civil service, conservative catholics and industry. The bourgeois, liberal middle ground that guarantees a stable democracy had been demolished and impoverished by war, inflation, unemployment and civil unrest. So, the road to destruction started with the anihilation of the middle class. Something to think about.

A. MacAulay

"Not quite, says Goldberg, though this is indeed the most common misconception about the ‘f’ word. It’s not the war part of fascism’s inherent militarism that liberals find so attractive but the way it gives the state the chance to take control and put the whole of society on a war footing."

One more aside to James Delingpole, that the American economy has been on a war footing since at least 1940. The criticism of "liberals" like Gore Vidal and "conservatives" like Eisenhower, is that the military-industrial complex is a parallel state within the USA and outwith all but symbolic democratic control.

donald fraser

Your insightful review made me consider the other side of the apparent liberal and well-known author Dr Peter Breggin. His book “Toxic Psychiatry” while criticising the medication of children, reads as a “how to” manual. He also coined the phrase “psychiatric holocaust” in publishing a pamphlet of this title through the Libertarian Alliance.

I found this term bothersome as he used it. By proposing it to describe what happened in Nazi Germany, it pre-empts the possibility of using this term to describe our current situation. While it would not be easy to re-visit the Anti-Psychiatry movement of the 1960s, clearly with such a wholesale rejection of this new social movement since the 1980s, questions could be asked if the right-wing might one day do so? If we consider our current society “broken”, it has not been through lack of willingness to medicate away mental illness! My view is the term “psychiatric holocaust” should refer to the period from the 1980s to date. Of course I’m not implying psychiatry kills, rather that millions lead diminished lives because of the ease by which the medical establishment asserts clinical validity of a medical model which is still relatively new.

Chad Edward

"You wonder why no one has made this point properly before."

As has been pointed out, that's just not true. My favorite version of this same idea is F.A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" which was published 65 years ago.

James R

Seb: "Goldberg, I am sure, will soon join Nick Cohen as one of the most reviled specimens of untermensch in the demonology of our bien pensant, preening Left."

Not really. Goldberg has been around for a while and seems to be doing quite well. You can't compare the two. Goldberg is an American, you see. Right-wing is allowed over there.

appleman

I have already had a moral struggle as a Christian about supporting the BNP - now resolved, and helped by some emails I received from fellow Christians. But that still left the political questions, what has gone wrong with our political situation and why does even a Conservative government fill me with dread. This article settled my last remaining doubts.

I may have misread one of the posts, but I do get annoyed when people write that we fought two world wars to stop the likes of the BNP. My grandfather was decorated in WW1 and my father killed in action in WW2. They would hate with fervour what has happened to the country they once fought to defend. I have little doubt they would find themselves forced back to voting BNP. As for me, this country I was once so proud of, will soon not be worth fighting for unless there is a radical change.

Kevin

One thing that unites Marxists, Nazis and Liberals is their belief in historical progress. The Marxists put their faith in a predicted worldwide proletarian revolution. What happened instead was a great war infused with the spirit of patriotism. The Nazis picked up on that and put their faith in the nation. When they lost, the Liberals put their faith in opposing the nation. Now that they are losing the jihad, the next stage for the Left is to put its faith in Allah.

Another thing that unites Marxists, Nazis and Liberals is that they hate Catholicism.

wlb29

Firstly, Liberalism at its core is based around the notion of the individual and constitutional government. I would, therefore, hope that even the most right-wing bloggers here would acknowledge that to some greater or lesser degree they are liberals.
Secondly, I am for the first time in my life considering voting for the Conservatives based on the failings of the current government, however, the general stupidity of articles like this and the remarks that follow serve only to make me have serious reservations about doing this.

Barca

There is a campaign in the US by the left to detest those who disagree with them, people such as conservatives, Mormons and Evangelical Christians. I live in CA. Illegal immigrants have practically put an annual lien on the CA exchequer that amounts to $10billion. Yet to justifiably denounce illegal immigration is to invite charges of racism by the New York Times and the L.A.Times. On a different note.

I believe that the liberal left regards Christians as their untermensch. In as much as Himmler saw the Jewish people's morality as a threat to the Nazi state, so do the liberals who see Christians-inheritors of the Jewish moral code-as a threat to their idea of Utopia.

Jonah Goldberg writes for the LA Times, my town's newspapers. He is the only conservative voice amidst an ocean of liberal voices. He is not liked in most of Los Angeles.

lauriemacdonell-sanchez

The finger-wagging, fallacious reasoning of "YouCannotBe Serious!" is typical of the Left's claptrap intended to muddy the waters of debate & quash any challenge to its propaganda. At the risk of sounding cliche, Communism & Socialism have always been opposite sides of the very same coin. Hitler was anti-Bolshi Communist because the latter were competing with him for hearts/minds/power in Germany. The desperate masses proved easy prey for his demagoguery. Franco jumped on Hitler's wagon because he too was fighting the Russian import. After all, it was Spain, not Russia, that the proponents of Marxism-Leninism intended as their first conquest. Let's not forget that other evil conjured up in the Frankenstein's lab of social engineering that was Germany between the World Wars: PC--political correctness, a concept of Lenin's that has metastasized into the silently lethal weapon that it is today. It has enabled the Left to make huge gains in the West, the latest triumph being the election of a red-diaper baby to the White House, a bloodless coup intended to be followed by the implosion of the US economy & an America "reborn" in a totally alien image.

Margot Darby

Let us ban forevermore any use of the word "Fascist" unless it actually refers to the regime of Il Duce. Liberals are not Fascisti, neither are Conservatives. You might as well call them Bonapartists. This deliberate misconstruance of Fascism was a popular bit of sophistry among the old Ayn Rand cult. I can understand why they, and other Jews of a Libertarian or Neocon stripe like to call their enemies "Fascists" rather than "Communists" but that does not sanitize the practice.

Daniel Lionsden

@Margot. Nice idea, but the word fascist has been used too long as a generic insult hurled at the right (by mindless lefties) for that to be possible. Goldberg is correct at looking at the precise historical context and reclaiming the word.
@youcannotbeserious (appropriate name) You may as well argue that the Bolsheviks murderous campaign against the milder socialists in Russia proves that they were rightwingers. Different leftwing factions are always at war with one another and frequently hate each other more than their supposed enemies. Compare also the war that Leftie icon JKF started with the Vietnamese communists (perhaps that proves he was rightwing too?) or the constant hatred between the old USSR and China.