Goldberg Ad Astra
I’m going to add some more commentary in a bit, as well as some more of Goldberg’s argument, but it’s interesting to watch what he’s doing here. We’re a few pages into the book, and he’s isolating the French Revolution from its causes and historical antecedents, and attempting to redefine it as the Protean liberal-fascist moment — as compared to the American Revolution, which was somehow “essentially conservative” within the context of millennia of (usually) hereditary monarchy, followed by a drib of English parliamentarianism. You have to wonder what he’d do with Oliver Cromwell.
Anyway, it’s obvious where he’s getting that hard dichotomy between the French and American Revolutions (it’s an old one, from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution), but watch where he goes with it. (The phrase, “leftists embrace cognitive dissonance and terminological sleight-of-hand” is a lovely exhibit of what poker players call ‘a tell.’)
That page defines the phrase – talking without saying anything.
I hope you are getting paid to read this nonsense….
Can’t see the quote. Mistake?
zomg I spent three yrs reading all about fascism for my term paper and this is what I lerned. There are many types of fascisms too many to understand what is really fascist but they are all fascist and there are many similarities between fascists and other things I don’t like. Fascists had parades. There were many parades in France. The French parades are different from American parades because American parades are American and the French parades are fascist.
…leftists embrace cognitive dissonance and terminological sleight of hand…
Said the man who calls Hitler a leftist and claims defining “left” and “right” is too slippery to really do.
It’s in a .jpg to the right of the text.
Are you using Internet Explorer?
Are there *any* legitimate citations in this book? He pull things like “The Nazis hated Christianity” out of his ass like so many butt-bogeys, but where on earth did he get the notion from?
Is this sustainable? There are over 400 pages of this crap. If we go page by page, we are going to completely run out of snark, and there are probably other worthy and deserving causes.
Does this asshat have even one clue what he’s talking about? You can’t define something as fascist simply because it fits your thesis. And Jonah’s proud of this book? Dear God, how in the hell did any of these conservatives ever get into power anywhere?
Now, now, DemKat…Conservative means Stupid, Ignorant and/or Evil, so it’s entirely possible that the one’s who gained power initially were just Evil, and built their power on a mudsill of Stupid and Ignorant labor.
When I said that history is fiction, this is exactly the sort of thing I was referring to.
The Italian fascists were protectors of the Jews
Uh, Sadly, No. Unless you call locking them up in 24 concentration camps “protecting.”
I knew a gentleman, now deceased, who fled to Italy from the Nazis in Austria only to be imprisoned in an Italian camp.
The American Revolution was “essentially conservative”?! What the fuck is wrong with these people? Age of Enlightenment, anyone? Anyone?
Anything they like is automatically conservative while anything they don’t like is automatically reflexively liberal. Yea, they can even turn rock and roll “conservative”. I wonder where nachos and big gulps stand on the left-right spectrum?
It would take longer to go through this tome and note every factual error, then to start from the front again and note every logical error, than it took for the darned thing to come to press. And that’s saying something…
Unless you call locking them up in 24 concentration camps “protecting.”
Remember, g, what these goobers advocate in the service of “protecting our freedoms.”
just read the page imaged. No surprise, but it is riddled with error and inconsistency.
The world could really use a fresh examination of fascism and the authoritarian impulse, and how to avoid slipping into it obliquely, but this isn’t it.
Most states have tried to appropriate religious fervor, symbolism and authority to their own uses. The French revolution was far from the first. Their hatred of the Church related to the Church being a supporter of the crown and beneficiary of taxes and state policies, which immiserated (factually accurate term) the lower classes.
The rites that the Directorate encouraged were celebration of the Enlightenment, about as far from paganism as it is possible to get. But, like, whatevs.
But I personally prefer the slogan from the Spanish Civil War:
“The Revolution will not be complete, until the last capitalist is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
Hmm. To redefine fascist mystical bullshit as areligious is obscene. Look up Iron Guard and Arrow Cross, Jonah. Look up Ku Klux Klan. This is so pathetic.
Yes, the American Revolution was conservative.
We drink coffee, so we dumped the tea in the harbor! Take that you lefty king-lovers you!
I agree with Jen. We have a hell of a ways to go here. When can our death ray of ridicule be aimed at Jonah his-own-self ?
Poor Fudgie The Whale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_and_religion
Nazism claimed to adhere to Positive Christianity which attempted to replace traditional Christian beliefs with those agreeable with Nazism, which many German Christians accepted.[1] Even in the later years of the Third Reich, many Protestant and Catholic clergy within Germany persisted in believing that Nazism was in its essence in accordance with Christian precepts.[1]
In 1941, Martin Bormann, a close associate of Hitler said publicly “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable” In 1942 he also declared in a confidential memo to Gauleiters that the Christian Churches ‘must absolutely and finally be broken.’ Thus, it is evident that he believed Nazism, based as it was on a ‘scientific’ world-view, to be completely incompatible with Christianity[2].
“When we [National Socialists] speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naive Christians and their spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God. The assertion that this universal force can trouble itself about the destiny of each individual being, every smallest earthly bacillus, can be influenced by so-called prayers or other surprising things, depends upon a requisite dose of naivety or else upon shameless professional self-interest”
Maybe Jonah ought to switch teams and play for the Christ-lovers? He might learn something about history.
…the American Revolution, which was “essentially conservative…” – Stay-Puff Marshmellow Man
Seriously. “Stupid” is never having to qualify or explain your bizarre claims. Did Lucianne home school Jonah using using altered and redacted Encyclopedia Britanica volumes, feeding him only honey and nutmeg like the moths in Silence of the Lambs?
Shorter Hanoj: Once you accept my central claim I do not need external evidence for anything I say to be valid, then you MUST admit I’m right !!!11!!!
Bwaaaaahhahaaaaaaaaaahah ~!~#~!~
It’s also fascinating how D.P.’s underpants, I mean sources, are on display: the sympathetic view of Italian fascism is, of course, regurgitated Mike Ledeen, garnished with a sprig of Burkean parsley.
Credible historians make a distinction between the revolutionary impulse up to August 1792, and the circumstances that made an English-style constitutional settlement unsustainable, not least the whole ‘France at war with Europe’s monarchies’ thing. And once you get rid of the monarchy, you need to fill the void with something. (The sniffiness in Burke’s critique comes down to his belief that Pomp Is Good, and that only the inheritors of the English tradition could be trusted to change their system of government.)
Of course, one could point to Petain’s Vichy puppet regime, and its championing of ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’ over ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’. But that doesn’t fit Pantload’s Procrustean bed.
Is Simon Schama’s Citizens in the bibliography, Gavin? Somehow, I doubt it.
Why, it’s like Umberto Eco for people who got drunk, fell down, hit their head on a coffee-table, and never regained consciousness!
Bathing the state and general will in an aura of sanctity.
But wait, wasn’t it the Caliphate that first turned politics into religion? Ya know, the original Islamo-fascists. I think they invented the Caliphate at least 5 or 6 years before the French Revolution.
Ah, shit. I forgot about them Roman Emperors as gods and the Roman state that tied its own functions and ritual to otherworldly beings. I think that was at least 50 years before the Caliphate, right? Ya know, the original Romano-fascists.
Crap. Mesopotamia. I mean, they were the original pre-Islamo-fascists even before the Bible got wrote, right? That must be like 1000 years ago that those guys were priest-kings.
I submit my review:
He who smelled it dealt it.
I wonder…what if we all encouraged people to buy as many copies of this book as possible.
Hear me out, as stupid as that sounds. We make it rocket to the top of the Amazon and NY Times BS list (best-seller, but roll your own).
Now it starts getting dissected on national TV and in the press…we might be doing Jonah a favor by getting his ass laughed out of the country before he strikes again.
So many things to talk about, and yet I keep coming to the sentence where he says Rousseau “divinized the people.” What the fuck does divinized mean? Did Mr. Pantload bother to check a dictionary? Or is it yet another piece of evidence that this is little more than a self-published book?
Oh, I don’t think so.
If you want to be astonished, though, you ought to see what he does with Ernst Nolte and George Mosse!
Take a break, guys.
.
“Divinized” is my new favorite word. I divinize that by the end of the book, the entire population of the EU (and a few people in Seattle and the Bay Area) will be fascists, the entire staff of Sadly No will have gone comatose, many new words will have been invented, and the zebra will be the murderer. This is my divinization.
Who ever said the French Revolution was disastrous ?
And cruel ? Do some reading on what the British did to Revolutionary war prisoners kept in the notorious “prison ships” in New York Harbor.
I would buy Jonah’s premise of the American Revolution being ‘conservative’ if and only if we define ‘conservative’ as being supportive of continuing legalized human slavery in the South and conducting a sustained and deliberate campaign of genocide on Native American tribes in the 13 colonies and the territories. Given that modern U.S. conservatives were very pro Apartheid right up until apartheid collapsed, I think that’s a fair assessment.
Rousseau said it, I believe it, that settles it.
So you say this book goes on for 400 pages with stuff like this?
Lemme ask something: How many peyote buttons did you have to chew to make it this far? As many as Fudgie had to in order to write this shit?
Honestly, this thing reads like the side of the Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap bottle…
The American Revolution was “essentially conservative”?! What the fuck is wrong with these people?
The American revolution was actually conservative, and it’s not a very controversial point to make (I learned it in high school as the conventional wisdom). Goldberg should have made his point a little more clear, but it’s not shocking or baseless to say the AR was basically conservative.
Sure, it was a revolution, but it was primarily motivated by economics and taxes(!)–we Americans didn’t want to change the English power structure, but transfer it into the hands of our own ruling elite. That is why the post-“revolution” Americans retained the English Common law system, and essentially retained the English system of parliamentary democracy, though of course we dispensed with the King and all that. The French Revolution was much more “revolutionary,” as were the 1848 uprisings across Europe, in the sense that the status quo itself was being rejected.
Us, we just wanted cheaper tea, or at the very least, to pay taxes to ourselves, as opposed to those British douches.
The Italian fascists were protectors of the Jews
Mr. Sparkle said,
December 18, 2007 at 23:40
So many things to talk about, and yet I keep coming to the sentence where he says Rousseau “divinized the people.” What the fuck does divinized mean?
See, he cut a hazel branch off and held it out at arms’ length…
O NOEZ HE HZ DIVINIZING RAY!
It kills me the way people like Goldberg try to tie history into neat little bundles that work out to say whatever they want them to say. The American Revolution, popular to the sad meanderings of Jonah’s tiny little brain, wasn’t even really a revolution so much as a rebellion, and to compare the two, as Burke first did, is folly. How can you compare the voluntary overthrow of a people’s own government to the active rebellion against a far-distant colonial ruler? Ugh. I’m not expressing myself as clearly as I’d like, but any real study of history makes the two events (for lack of a better term) a lot more complicated than “teh libralzzz! they is evil!”)
You know, it’s always amusing to see what passes for an intellectual on the right.
But it is deeply controversial to say that is was fascist, because the French Revolution is the fons et origo of the left and teh “revolutionary tradition.”
No, it’s not “controversial,” it’s just fucking stupid because it’s an anachronism. Goldberg has merely drawn up two columns of “good” and “bad,” according to his I-have-saved-up-enough-box-tops excuse for an education, and then either appropriated them or dumped them in the neighbor’s trash by means of second-hand right blogsphere tripe.
The American right and clasical liberals look fondly on the American Revolution, which was essentially conservative …
No, they look fondly on their Time Life Books™ notion of an American revolution so completely radical that it’s very geography and demography had to be paved over and written off once the Torries realized what side their bread was buttered on and became “patriots”. Sanitizing the revolution is still going on today, apparently.
The sad thing is that Jonah has already admitted how long it took him to produce this crap.
.
I’m not a huge fan of origianlism, but if you’re going to redefine fascism, and aru ethat it fis your thesis shouldn’t you at the very least have to lay out a definition of the term that is in some way parallel to that which was used by the movements founders? I mean otherwise you’re just left with so much meaningless pablum?
I was putting together a list of people who wouldn’t be pissed off by what I’ve read so far. Then I realized it would be easier to list those who wouldn’t. Here is my list:
1. The Ku Klux Klan.
2. Italians who are atheists, provided none of their ancestors were in a concentration camp.
His structureless use of language, historical and political context makes it as if you could replace the word “fascist” with any adjective.
I’d love to see how a high school teacher would grade this page in a Eurpoean History class.
Us, we just wanted cheaper tea, or at the very least, to pay taxes to ourselves, as opposed to those British douches.
—
Ummm … that’s not true. The Constitution is evidence. For example, England still does not have anything the equivalent of the Bill of Rights. The Constitution created a truly revolutionary break with the status quo.
So apparently, “left”, “right” AND “fascism” are all difficult to define, in Jonah’s world.
I guess that makes it easy to define them any way one pleases, to reach any conclusion one wishes.
But the real BALLS is to claim that leftists engage in a terminological sleight of hand.
Hundreds of pagan-themed festivals were launched across the country celebration Nation, Reason, Brotherhood, Liberty, and other abstractions in order to bathe the state and the general will in an aura of sanctity. As we shall see, the Nazis emulated the Jacobins in minute detail.
Not so much a brainfart, more like a brain elephant diarrhea explosion. The French celebrations weren’t “pagan,” they were a complete disaster, never repeated, and if the Nazis were emulated the Jacobins I guess that means that they wrote the fucking Ring Cycle.
Wotan wept. Nazi paganism never got beyond a soggy Otaku-kin obsession with Wagner.
Where in the wide world of fuckwittedness did this cancerous crotch-fruit get his education?
.
Lucianne is very proud of her ‘boy’ right about now. And Scaife has already ordered a million copies. They will be given out free as gifts with new FrontPageMag subscriptions.
It reminds me more of the delusional ramblings of a cult leader than the precice, reasoned conclusions of a political philosopher.
GM Texan:
Goucher College. Former womens’ college outside of Baltimore. He disgraces it rather badly.
Do you still have a blog?
Nazis = anti-rationalism = Fascism.
French revolution = apotheosis of rationalism and the Enlightenment project = Fascism.
“Ummm … that’s not true. The Constitution is evidence. For example, England still does not have anything the equivalent of the Bill of Rights. The Constitution created a truly revolutionary break with the status quo.”
Shouldn’t that be said in the past-tense?
Burke can be excused, to some extent, given that Reflections was published in 1790, and he wasn’t able to ‘divinize’ [sic] the future; D.P., not so much.
‘American Revolution’ is, itself, a loaded term; that British historians call it the ‘American War of Independence’ isn’t just nationalistic sour grapes. (The historiographical debates over what to call the 1640s in British history are even more complex: English Civil War? Or ‘Civil Wars’? The British Wars? The ‘English Revolution’, as seems quite common in American teaching?)
But that’s a tangent here. The really interesting thing here is that Pantload invokes post-1792 revolutionary measures as the wellspring of ‘teh librul fascism’, but doesn’t see any parallels between ‘La Patrie en danger’ and, say, the PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security et al. after 2001, even though the panic of Summer 1792 was in response to an actual friggin’ invasion that looked like it would head all the way to Paris.
I love the “if” in “If the French Revolution was fascist…”
And if Goldberg made a coherent, honest argument based on actual history, I’m sure we’d all be very impressed.
POSIT: Fascist revolutions = turning politics into a religion.
French Revolution = turned politics into a religion.
THEREFORE French Revolution = fascist revolution.
Fascist revolution = poisoned tree.
French Revolution = fruit of poisoned tree
POSIT French Revolution = belongs to the story of the left.
IF French Revolution –> belongs to story of the left THEN story of the left = fascist revolution.
THEREFORE story of the left = fascist revolution.
————————
HOWEVER:
Fascisms Fascisms?
Turning politics into a religion turning politics into a religion.?
QUERY: Did Nazis turn politics into a religion?
IF Nazis = turned politics into a religion THEN Nazis = fascist revolution.
IF Nazis turned politics into a religion THEN Nazis fascist revolution.
QUERY: Nazis = fascist revolution?
Not surprisingly, Jonah forgets to mention that one of “horrors and follies” of the American Revolution was that it legalized human slavery, a decision which, among other things directly led to the “horrors” of the astoundingly massive bloodletting of the U.S. Civil War.
None of this happened in the ‘disastrous’ French Revolution.
Ben said, December 18, 2007 at 23:45
The American Revolution was “essentially conservative”?! What the fuck is wrong with these people?
The American revolution was actually conservative, and it’s not a very controversial point to make (I learned it in high school as the conventional wisdom). Goldberg should have made his point a little more clear, but it’s not shocking or baseless to say the AR was basically conservative.
Of course there was a transfer of power to our shores and taxes were a significant factor but there was equal concern in establishing substantial boundaries, in writing, between the power delegated to the government and protection of the natural rights of the people – this was NOT just lip service. This liberal trend is also evident in many state constitutions developed in 18th C America. In large part, the revolutionary language pre-revolution to post-revolution focused on these natural rights – not Christian rights, not Jesus-given rights , but rights derived from the natural state of man.
Enlightenment-based revolutionary theory, memorialized in the declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, was far from what I would call conservative – at least as it applied to the relationship of citizen to government.
In a western world yielding to the arbitrary rule of divinely-anointed kings, this was pretty liberal:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It’s a John Waters reference. Don’t get him started on the homokitschofascists.
For example, England still does not have anything the equivalent of the Bill of Rights.
Really? Then I wonder where the authors of the American version cribbed from.
(Yeah, it’s not entirely the same. But the Constitution and BoR came a lot later than the whole ‘kick out the king’ business, and it’s a stretch to see 1787 inherent in 1776.)
Had the U.S. retained a hereditary sovereign and a state religion, I’d say it was just about tea and taxes.
The question remains: were the Nazis fascists? According to the outline of the ‘reasoning’ of the page, Jonah has defined “fascist revolution” as “turning politics into religion”.
Did the Nazis turn politics into religion?
If they did, then according to Jonah’s calculus (please forgive me, Newton / Liebniz), they were fascists.
If they did not, then the Nazis were not fascists.
I want a decision, and I want it soon: Were the Nazis fascists, Jonah?
I dunno … a case has been made that some of the propaganda aspects of the French revolution anticipated those of fascism (c.f. the work of the artist David). But, by that standard, the Leninist rhetoric of today’s conservatives makes them Commies. Anyway, do liberals really like the prelude to fascist aspects of the French revolution?
(FWIW, though, I dunno how radical the American revolution really was … most of the revolutionaries were either bourgeois or wanted to get away from Britain ’cause they wanted to go back to manoralism … the liberal, democratic aspects of the American revolution — remember when some neo-manoralist, either 18th century or 21st century goes on about “liberty”, they do not mean what we might think they mean — were largely championed by furriners — don’t forget the Poles! who presumably carried some Tartar influence which might make our revolution Islamofascist? — Jews and people influenced by said groups …)
Also, is Wagner really pagan? Wagner certainly uses pagan myths to tell his stories, but is a story about how the old pagan gods had to end up getting themselves offed really a pagan positive story? If one is sufficiently crazy, as I am as can be judged by looking at old blog entries of mine (c.f. my blog title), one can argue that there are Jewish themes in Wagner’s operas. Certainly, Wagner’s thinking is more “Axial age” than pre-Axial age pagan or post-Axial Age pagan revival.
I hope some day to shit forth a tome and get paid for it. Jonah gives me hope that desire is rational and achievable.
Burke can be excused, to some extent, given that Reflections was published in 1790, and he wasn’t able to ‘divinize’ [sic] the future
I thought ten thousand thousand farts must have leaped from their underpants, for Jonah Goldberg to have written a book that so insults the intelligence.
Anyway, do liberals really like the prelude to fascist aspects of the French revolution?
I doubt a typical American voter who describes themselves as liberal every really thinks much about the French Revolution at all. The details of the French Revolution is not central and prominent to modern American liberals’ sense of politics, ideals and self.
This is another reason why Fuck Nut is so stoopid. Because he can’t call the American Revolution fascist, Jonah has to stumble through the turnip patch of history for … ahh … the French !!! La Guillotine !!! Oppressed Nice White Rich People !!! The Estate Tax !!! And they speak French !!!!
Anything they like is automatically conservative while anything they don’t like is automatically reflexively liberal.
Yes, and this, really, is the key to deciphering a lot of conserva-babble. They don’t use the words “liberal” and “conservative” as most people do, which is to describe a general set of beliefs or an adherent to that set of beliefs. They also use them as synonyms for “bad” and “good” respectively–and this tautology works both ways. So it’s not just that anything conservative is by (their) definition good, it’s also that anything good is by (their definition) conservative. People have hit on this point in other threads about this stupid book:
Fascism = bad
Bad = liberal
Therefore, fascism = liberal.
To wingnuts, this is terrific logic. To the rest of us…not so much.
What if he really isn’t very bright and believes what he says?
For instance, maybe he went to Italy and people were nice to him but he went to Germany and they weren’t. Therefore only Germans killed the Jews.
Paraphrase Jonah The Whale: ” ‘Liberal’ and ‘Fascist’ are terms which I may use however I want. It’s just like when Karl, or Don, or Doug, or George, or Condi, or my Mommy says something you think isn’t true — but they said it, so it is. Reality is what you want it to be. Liberals are fascists because I say so. ”
Therefore Sophie Scholl, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Willy Brandt, Albert Camus, and many who gave their lives in Europe fighting against the nazis, were all fascists. It’ll sure be one heck of a surprise to their families, huh?
Oh, and the victims of the Falangists, and the Blackshirts, and the nazis who were liberal in thought, speech and practice. They had to be fascists, too.
How many of the human beings killed in the death camps would you estimate that to be, Jonah? Given that you’re a really wise and knowledgable and compassionate person and everything.
I’ll bet you could come up with a number. Just do what you did with your book — and make it up.
They don’t use the words “liberal” and “conservative” as most people do, which is to describe a general set of beliefs or an adherent to that set of beliefs. – Principal Blackman
Um … actually, most people don’t use “liberal” and “conservative” this way either. Liberal and conservative have become brands of the Democratic and Republican parties respectively (because of the best efforts of the GOP and in spite of the best efforts by the Democrats). Because the GOP was the group that was behind this branding, liberal has become, in the popular imagination, whatever the GOP chooses it to mean. So you can imagine it can’t be good.
Even people who ought to know better regularly denounce “liberals” … but the liberals they are denouncing would hardly be called liberals by real liberals. Yet the behavior of, e.g., media villagers, is cited by folks as why they don’t like liberals and won’t vote Democratic.
I think Jonah is giving me permission to shove a boot up his doughy ass. In fact, I think he is saying that a liberal, I am practically destined to do so.
And believe me, I am tempted to, but, I fear the pantload would actually enjoy having a boot shoved up his butt so I shall respectfully decline the offer.
*swallow* Are you saying that this is based, in some way, on what people learn in school? And that this isn’t a kind of outstanding comedy genius that can never be repeated, after all?
Did Mr. Pantload bother to check a dictionary?
No.
Or is it yet another piece of evidence that this is little more than a self-published book?
Yes.
Are there *any* legitimate citations in this book?
So far, reports indicate “no.”
Does this asshat have even one clue what he’s talking about?
No.
Dan Someone @23:15 has nailed it:
`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master — that’s all.’
Was Abe Simpson one of his sources?
“The Nazis,” at least some of them, in the leadership, were anti-Christian. But the mass rank and file were most definitely not.
The Italians, to the extent they resisted the German demands for extermination, “protected” the Jews. Only in a relative sense to the Nazis, as they were still deprived of their freedom and livelihoods, just not, for the most part, until the end of the Italian fascist autonomy, their lives.
Calling the American Revolution “conservative” is plain asinine.
Labelling the French Revolution “fascist” is plain asinine.
However, all of this is central to my thesis.
Dude, leave me out of this.
DAS said,
December 19, 2007 at 0:22
Also, is Wagner really pagan? Wagner certainly uses pagan myths to tell his stories, but is a story about how the old pagan gods had to end up getting themselves offed really a pagan positive story?
Whaaaaat? YES, Wagner’s work is Pagan, at least the 19th Century Romantic interpretation of paganism. It does deal with the Death of the Gods, but discusses it in a pagan context, pagan heroes, with the pagan rules of engagement: this wasn’t judgment day, but Gotterdammerung.
Siegfried is a pagan hero in a pagan world, and his values are the values of the Pagan world: courage, martial prowess, the importance of Oaths, etc, instead of the values of the Christian world.
one is sufficiently crazy, as I am as can be judged by looking at old blog entries of mine (c.f. my blog title), one can argue that there are Jewish themes in Wagner’s operas. Certainly, Wagner’s thinking is more “Axial age” than pre-Axial age pagan or post-Axial Age pagan revival.
I seriously don’t know how to respond to this except…have you ever HEARD of Wagner?
Yes, it would indeed be crazy to find a known Anti-Semite who wrote grandiose comic operas that were nationalist and triumphalist and racialist (extorting the Teutonic peoples) to use Jewish themes.
Almost as crazy as saying the French Revolution is Facist.
The title of this chapter is ‘Everything you know about Facism is wrong’.
Given the quality of this book, could this have been the only thing that a reviewer wrote on the submitted manuscript before giving up, and that Goldberg took is as a chapter title suggestion.
And enough with the “we just wanted cheaper tea”. The Boston Tea Party happened in response to the reduction of taxes on tea. The East India Company imported tea to the American colonies, but couldn’t sell it because it was being undercut by smugglers such as John Hancock.
The smugglers, of course, weren’t paying the import taxes imposed in the 1760s to meet the costs of defending the colonies against the French and their Indian allies.
Being politically well-connected, the Company appealed for help to Parliament. Parliament agreed to lift the requirement for the Company to ship tea through Britain and pay British duty; the Company could import directly from India to the colonies, and would only have to pay a small duty on landing the tea in Boston.
This was great for the Company (less taxes) and for the colonists (cheaper tea) but not for people like John Hancock. Tea was a popular commodity, and undercutting the smuggling business by allowing the sale of cheap legal tea would mean that Hancock would have to find an honest job. Alternatively, he could do what he in fact did, and organize a raid on the Company’s tea stocks.
The best modern analogy would be this: after the repeal of Prohibition, the Capone Gang, annoyed that their lucrative bootlegging business is now going to wither away, firebomb the Jack Daniels distillery.
Oregon Guy:
Sorry, the answer is no.
And thanks for checking for me, I couldn’t even bring myself to google him. Though I must say I’m disappointed that he isn’t another Ivy League legacy drone.
.