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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.533
EAN num: 9780385511841
ISBN number: 0385511841
Label: Doubleday
Manufacturer: Doubleday
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 496
Printing Date: January 08, 2008
Publishing house: Doubleday
Release Date: January 08, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 246
Studio: Doubleday
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“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?
Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.
Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.
Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.
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Rated by buyers 
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This was a very deep and historical book. There is a lot of stuff in here I didn't know. I didn't know that the lady that originally started the Family Planning organization did not believe in abortion at all but only believed in birth control. Hitler got many of his ideas from people right here in our country! The true goal of abortion is eugenics, which means to eliminate the unwanted people from earth to create a great race of people. Abortion was not originally created to help people. This is similar to what Hitler's people did. They killed all the old and handicapped people very first because they were considered un-useful to society. This book is highly informative and tells you who progressives and liberals really are and their true intentions.
Rated by buyers -
Jonah Golberg's book is a deft expose of the hidden history of fascism in America, tracing its roots back to the leftist totalitarian regimes of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Golberg connects all the arcane, hidden, obscured dots to give the reader a factual account of the rise of modern American liberalism, which he calls "smiley-face facism-'nice' facisism."
No, he does not call modern liberals Nazis or deny the Holocaust (with his Jewish roots this would be bizarre indeed). What he does do is to examine how the word fascism is used by people who have no idea what it actually means, then provides a working definition of the term. He then points out that, minus the death camps, gulags and racial predjudices, modern liberalism shares a lot of the same ideology with historic Fascism, Nazism and Communism, (I always thought this was obvious) further pointing out (what I also always thought was obvious) that these three are all decidedly left-wing ideologies. It was the leftist Stalin who, reinventing the terminology, accused any leftist not sharing all of his particular leftist views of being right-wing. However underneath the rhetoric all of these ideologies shared very similar basic assumptions. So one service Mr. Goldberg has done is to explode the myth that Fascism and Nazism were/are right-wing ideologies.
Goldberg traces the rise of American liberal ideology from Benito Mussolini, through Adolf Hitler, and American Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. Again, he doesn't argue that these American presidents were, or modern liberals are, genocidal racial purists, he simply points out that racial purity was merely one plank in the Nazis' liberal leftist platform, and that there are many other ideological similarities between modern liberalism and these historic ideologies.
At 405 pages of text the book is fairly hefty, however it reads rather quickly (at least to me.) Further, the book also has 53 pages of footnotes, so Goldberg's references can be checked by skeptics. All-in-all its a fascinating history of the rise of fascism and modern liberalism's debt to this leftist ideology. Goldberg's book should act as a corrrective to a lot of sloppy scholarship, generalizations and misunderstandings.
I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Rated by buyers -
The title of this review pretty much says it all. Goldberg begins the book with an examination of fascist theory that gets to its true roots. Communism, fascism, totalitarianism, and other isms are reviewed in a historical context along with the misuse of the word fascist in contemporary American society. Goldberg writes from a noticeably conservative stance but supports his arguments with historical facts, documents, etc. Conservatives will love it while liberals will probably hate it, although Goldberg gives liberals credit where credit is due, and he argues his point in mostly an objective and factual manner rather than from a political/partisan point-of-view.
Rated by buyers -
This may be a little cliche, but this book is a quintessential example of, "When you draw a lot of flak, you know you're over the target". A good indicator of a great book is the number of 5-Star AND 1-Star ratings. If you look at the 1-Star ratings, the comments are mostly shallow, contain a lot of name-calling, and they seldom contain any examples to back up their flames. Either they haven't read the book or they've only read the introduction. The book itself is a well-documented history of Marxism / Socialism and its consequences. Goldberg convincingly argues that Fascism is leftist (Marxist, socialist). Corporations seldom backed Fascist leaders prior to their rise to power (remember, corporations are mostly amoral, profit is their primary goal).
Up until I read this book, I thought that the term "progressive" was simply a euphemism for spending a lot of money on bad ideas. I never realized that it went back to the very beginnings of Marxism.
Marxism is a vision of a utopia that can never be realized on earth. Marx developed his theories in the isolation of libraries, and were never tested in the real-world prior to publishing. The primary fallacy of Marxism is its neglect of the flaws of human nature. All utopias rely on the false hope of the emergence of a "New Man" where humans evolve to a higher level of behavior. The reality is that humanity will always fall short: humans are a greedy, self-centered, immoral, lazy, and ungrateful bunch of louts. When is the last time you heard someone say, "Thank You" after getting a government handout?
The academics who are Marx's greatest cheerleaders are a sweet bunch of well-intentioned fools - or as Lenin put even better, "useful idiots". Brilliant fools are still fools. Academics have the great privilege of spending their entire lives living in Marxist Utopias paid for by capitalists. They live in an insular culture where they only associate with those who have beliefs similar to their own. The worth of their labor is judged solely by their peers. This leads to an increasingly abstracted set of ideas and beliefs that steadily diverge from reality.
Marxism has slaughtered more people than any movement in history. Now they are saying, "let's give it one more try". And these are the same people who want to "save the polar bears" based on an abstract theory called "global warming". Well, that's another story.
Rated by buyers -
I suspect that the ivory tower elites will despise this book. University acadamia and the media always equate conservative governments such as the USA under Dubya and Canada under Prime Minister Harper as being the equivalent to Nazis Germany under Hitler. Jonah Goldberg deftly exposes the fact the the Liberal Left have more in common with the National Socialists than just the term "socialist".
It all boils down to individual rights ie the true conservative view that each person is of infinite value vs the socialist view that the worth of the individual must be sacrificed for the "good" of the State. Which is a paradox unto itself, considering that Liberalism/Socialism does not recognize the concepts of good and evil, only moral equivalence.
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