Culture

[Essay] You filty fascist!

New books highlight the scourge of political name-calling

Steven Wells

Hey, progressives, throw open the windows and smell the new day a-dawning! We got Obama, savagely kicking Clintonite ass with his radical platform of massive wealth distribution, the deporting of all white Southerners to Alaska and the nationalization of all banks and major industries. You can just see him on Day 1 as president, forcing the corrupt and inefficient Republican apparatchiks into the streets, making them dig their own graves in the asphalt with pneumatic drills, neck-shooting the assholes and then sending their relatives the bill for the bullets. Way to go, Glorious Leader! God, it’s great to be a liberal in America.

Or is it? I’ve just read a couple of books that have left me deeply depressed. Why? One word: fascism.

First up is the paperback release of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges, which basically argues that the crazy Christian fascists are gonna take over and we’re all gonna die oh my god oh my god oh my god.

Then there’s the hardback Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg, which basically argues that America has already experienced fascism under all its Democratic presidents. Which is just silly.

Given that the “mainstream” American right is so far to the right that it A) supports and has supported actual fascists all over the world, and B) contains actual fascists, it’s always amusing when right-wingers A) claim that leftists are always throwing the label “fascist” around, while B) themselves calling everybody they don’t like fascists.

Thus feminists become “feminazis,” antiwar demonstrators become “peace fascists,” your uncle Pete and his live-in friend Ernie become “the stormtroopers of gay liberation,” your mom is a “safety fascist,” and Dick Cheney’s former allies in the holy war against communism are suddenly “Islamofascists.”

And nutjob blogger Jonah Goldberg gets to write a book claiming liberals are fascists (with a cute Hitler-’stached smiley face on the cover).

For my money Goldberg doesn’t go far enough. Just as those Americans who fought fascism in the 1930s were smeared as “premature anti-fascists,” so those Americans who opposed Ronald Reagan’s support of Islamic terrorism in the 1980s must now be smeared as “premature anti-Islamofascists.”

Because, as the right so rightly point out, while it was okay to be friendly with European and Japanese fascists before December 1941, so it was okay to befriend, arm, fund and train Islamofascists right up until 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001. But not okay one second after. And anybody who says different is a filthy anti-Islamofascistfascist.

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