Let’s check in with some old favorites
Just checking in with Jonah Goldberg:
Was Fascism Right-Wing (Again)?
Yep. Still dumb as a stump. What is this, like a decade of being wrong?
Let’s see who Dr Victor Davis Hanson wants to get off his lawn today:
The Westernized Anti-Westerner
What accounts for hatred of the West by people who voluntarily spent years here?
Hmm, it’s almost as if people come to the USA for many reasons including for education, employment, and asylum. It’s almost like when they get here, they aren’t always greeted with open arms. Some of them have to bear the brunt of racism, xenophobia and classism. Many of them are broke. And it turns out, lots of people come to the USA because it is the best choice of a lot of bad choices, but for them it is still a bad choice. And so, when they finish their education, or when things calm down at home, or when they have made enough money that they can return, many people choose to leave the USA behind and return to their own families in their own country with a head full of bad memories of their time here.
As a general rule, when we encounter Westernized anti-Westerners, we should expect that the more they know about who we are at home, rather than what we do abroad, the angrier they will become
This is just about the only sentence in the Dr. Hanson’s column that makes anything close to sense. He spends a lot of time blaming “a mostly left-wing homegrown anti-Americanism” on the university campuses for turning foreign students into high profile political leaders with a profound anti-American bias. His thesis which seems to be, that they come here and see how decadent we are what with our rights for women, and gay marriage, and that’s what makes them hostile to the western world, and not the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, our unquestioning support for Israel, our support of oppressive regimes and our hundred year history of meddling in the middle east so we get an unlimited supply of oil.
He seems to think that the wealthy and educated people who return from their various educations and exiles are gaining power by railing against western decadence. And I guess I’m not sure what Dr. Hanson’s problem with that is, because he’s built his career doing the exact same thing.
Went wading into the weeds to find what delicious mangoes I could find….
They hate us for the same reasons the left-wingers hate us:
– we are free
– we didn’t ask their permission to be free
– a free people do not bow down to anyone
WTF? Is it me or is every one of these wingnuts seriously deranged?
No, it’s not you. They’re all seriously deranged.
~
Jo-Nah’s an environmentalist: He’s reducing, recycling & reusing his garbage.
Hanson stultus est.
They hate us for the same reason left wingers hate us? Either someone needs to play some hokey – pokey (which really is what it’s all about ) so he can learn which hand is which or the projection is strong in this one.
Dorian Johnson, figure in Michael Brown case, arrested in St. Louis
One day after he filed charges against the city of Ferguson, Officer Wilson, and the former police chief.
What a coinkydink!
Still dumb as a stump. What is this, like a decade of being wrong?
Ah say. That boy’s about as sharp as a sack full of wet mice.
– Foghorn Leghorn
His thesis which seems to be, that they come here and see how decadent we are what with our rights for women, and gay marriage, and that’s what makes them hostile to the western world, and not the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, our unquestioning support for Israel, our support of oppressive regimes and our hundred year history of meddling in the middle east so we get an unlimited supply of oil.
American righties have so much in common with Islamic fundamentalists. Their hate is based on envy- they’d love to have free rein to punish those people, like their Middle Eastern doppelgängers do.
American,righties have so much in common with Islamic fundamentalists.
Indeed. Which recalls a classic essay on this very subject.
http://www.uuworld.org/2004/01/feature2.html
VDH isn’t wrong, exactly, for a certain value of “foreigners who live in America hate it.” Applies pretty well to Sayyid Qutb, one of the fathers of modern jihadi ideology, who spent time in America and came away utterly repelled by its immorality.
On the other hand, the chances of Sayyid Qutb’s hatred having anything to do with left wingers on college campuses is… vanishingly small; these left wingers were part of the problem as far as he was concerned, just like the Nasserists and Communists in his own country. I doubt if most of the people VDH is talking about share Qutb’s hatred of the West as a cultural entity based on its immoral lifestyle, too. And why do I have a feeling that by “hatred of the West,” VDH means “insufficient subservience to Thatcherite/Reaganite ideology?”
Oh, well.
Conservatives have a funny tendency to lump everyone they don’t like into a great big fuzzy “Everyone Else.” In foreign policy, this gives you the Axis of Evil. In domestic policy, it gives you the belief that the Crips and Bloods are the same as opportunistic looters who are the same as political protesters. This is just more of the same.
They also have a funny tendency to believe in the existence of a power center called the Liberal Elite, which really is the Elders of Zion or the Masonic Conspiracy of our day and age. The idea that elitist colleges are plotting to bring foreigners here and turn them into anti-American agents is just weird, but perfectly in line with that line of thought.
(And I love the racial subtext, that the dumb brutes aren’t coming to their own conclusions about anything, they require scheming, machiavellian white liberals to lead them to “anti-Western” thought. Shades of the old Southern belief that blacks were naturally happy and docile and the only reason we can’t all get along under Jim Crow is because of Yankee agitators who keep coming down and stirring them up).
“Was Fascism Right Wing?”
Well, in the sense that it was bankrolled, financed, allied with and otherwise supported by all the right wing power centers in Germany and Italy (the big industrialists, the clergy, the military and aristocracy), and that these power centers did that specifically because fascism promised to crush the left…
“Oh, but were fascists themselves really right wingers?” I don’t know. What’s the difference between a movement that allies with all the institutions of the right wing, hates all the same people as the right wing, does all of the right wing’s dirty work for it, and constructs its ideology entirely out of right wing memes, and a right winger? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it just might be a duck!
FYWP.. I’ll try this again…
http://www.uuworld.org/2004/01/feature2.html
Pwning* Sir Pant of St. Load on his stale political Shyalamanism just feels so, so sad now.
____________________________________________________
* Where “pwning” = “requesting that you stop using your feces as face-paint, at least in public”
That was interesting, guy. I didn’t agree with all of it, obviously, but it was nice to get a whole different and calm perspective. Thanks.
Well, in the sense that it was bankrolled, financed, allied with and otherwise supported by all the right wing power centers in Germany and Italy (the big industrialists, the clergy, the military and aristocracy), and that these power centers did that specifically because fascism promised to crush the left…
Don’t forget that the right wing power center in the United States also supported European fascism. Prescott Bush banked with them, and Ford supported their anti-semitism.
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk…
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/07/1383115/-Unsurprisingly-Federal-Judge-In-Nebraska-Dismisses-Suit-Against-All-Homosexuals
Helmut, love you man, and all the rest of you rat bastards….
New one up, a self indulgent, poorly written, Birthday related naval gaze!!!
….
“Was fascism right wing?”
DOES A POPE SHIT IN THE WOODS YOU DUMMY? Of course it’s right wing–that’s why they’re called reactionaries.
Don’t forget that the right wing power center in the United States also supported European fascism. Prescott Bush banked with them, and Ford supported their anti-semitism.
Also definitely true. And probably just as much a part of the appeasement syndrome as pacifism and bad memories of WW1.
I think the foreign reaction to fascism is slightly more complicated because far right movements can trigger one of two reactions among far right movements in neighboring countries; either “at last, an ally in our righteous war against the godless left!” or “hey, you assholes! That far right stuff’s only okay when WE do it!” The Western reaction to fascism turned out Oswald Mosley and Philippe Petain, but also Winston Churchill and Charles De Gaulle – if not exactly far right, still guided by that same mystical sense of national destiny.
You get shades of this nowadays in our right wing’s schizophrenic relationship with Putin – they can’t decide if he’s the latest Hitler or the dreamiest, manliest man who ever lived.* Same thing before 9/11 with the jihadis (arguably in some ways even since 9/11).
* But, you know, not in a gay kind of way.
V.D.H. is basically regurgitating Dinesh D’Souza’s call for us to make common cause with Islamists, or at least appease them, by accepting their notions of sexual limits as law. He is not quite as explicit in this because foreigners, which makes him uncomfortable even when he agrees with them.