In his new book, Goldberg has decided to dream up fascists on the left rather than acknowledge the fact that the real American fascists have been lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years.
David Neiwert | January 8, 2008 | web only
... 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.
This became manifest in the Italian fascist and German Nazi transformations from a faction of street thugs into an actual political power that seized the reins of government, when fascists gradually shed all pretensions or appeals to socialism and became violently anti-socialist and anti-communist. But it was present all along; "the Left" were the people who were beaten and murdered in the 1920s by the squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans sent off to Nazi concentration camps like Dachau were not Jews but socialists, communists, and other left-wing political prisoners, including "liberal" priests and clerics ...
Yet Goldberg incorrectly claims that "populism had never been known as a conservative or right phenomenon before" Mussolini. In fact, populism has historically been a broad-ranging phenomenon that expressed itself in both right- and left-wing politics, as Chip Berlet has described in some detail in his 2000 book, Right-Wing Populism in America, which details its history from Bacon's Rebellion to the Ku Klux Klan to the modern-day Posse Comitatus and militia/Patriot movements. What distinguishes these populists from their left-wing counterparts, as Berlet explains, is that "they combine attacks on socially oppressed groups with grassroots mass mobilization and distorted forms of antielitism based on scapegoating." Yet, building on a false characterization of the history of populism, Goldberg goes on to characterize such historical figures as Father Charles Coughlin, the rabid anti-Semitic radio talker of the 1930s, and Sen. Joe McCarthy as left-wing figures simply because of their populist foundations ...
Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg's book is any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance -- all of them openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the nation's most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National Alliance's William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton "American fascists," but he makes no mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke -- all of them bona fide fascists: the real thing ...
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=jonah_goldbergs_bizarro_history
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