Holocaust Denier Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History
Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author of 1984 once dismissed the misuse of "fascism" as meaning "something not desirable." Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the word's meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it -- he refers to Orwell's critique as his "definition of fascism."
And then Goldberg proceeds to define everything that he himself considers undesirable as "fascist." This is just about everything even remotely and vaguely thought of as "liberal": vegetarianism, Social Security, multiculturalism, the "war on poverty," "the politics of meaning." The figures he labels as fascist range from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg's primary achievement is to rob the word of all meaning -- Newspeak incarnate.
The term "fascism" certainly is overused and abused. The public understanding of it is fuzzy at best, and academics struggle to agree on a definition, as Goldberg observes -- and he makes use of that confusion to ramble on for pages about the disagreements without ever providing readers with a clear definition of fascism beyond Orwell's quip.
Along the way, he grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain ineluctable traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin calls its "palingenesis" -- that is, its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously -- no, viciously -- anti-liberal.
So when Goldberg proclaims early on: "This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists," more thorough observers of history might instead just shake their heads. After all, the facts of Mussolini's utopian/socialist origins and the Nazis' similar appeals to socialism by incorporating the name are already quite well known to the same historians who consistently describe fascism as a right-wing enterprise.
What these historians record -- but Goldberg variously ignores or minimizes -- is that the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in fact purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered "socialist" support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and that the larger Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of Mein Kampf are devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war against "the Left," and not merely the Marxism that Goldberg acknowledges was a major focus of Hitler's animus.
