Over at the Voxiversity.

From pages 369-371:

…Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or “natural” categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed. Or as the line goes in The Da Vinci Code, “So Dark, the Con of Man.”

The “con” in question is, in effect, a conspiracy by the Catholic
Church to deceive the world about Jesus’ true nature and his marriage to Mary Magdalene. The book has sold some sixty million copies worldwide. The novel, and movie, have generated debates, documentaries, companion books, and the like. But few have called attention to the ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought.
Dan Brown should have dedicated his book to “Madame” Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist guru who is widely considered the “mother” of New Age spirituality as well as a touchstone in the development of Nazi paganism and the chief popularizer of the swastika as a mystical symbol. Her theosophy included a grab bag of cultish notions, from astrology to the belief that Christianity was a grand conspiracy designed to conceal the true meaning and history of the supernatural. Her 1888 book, The Secret Doctrine, attempted to prove the full extent of the grotesque Western conspiracy that The Da Vinci Code only partially illuminates. Christianity was to blame for all the modern horrors of capitalism and inauthentic living, not to mention the destruction of Atlantis.  
Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, the second most important book in the Nazi canon, borrowed ideas wholesale from Blavatsky. Rosenberg lays out one Christian conspiracy after another. “Before it could fully blossom, the joyous message of German mysticism was strangled by the anti-European church with all the means in its power,” he insists. Like Blavatsky and Brown, he suggests the existence of secret Gospels, which, had they not been concealed by the Church, would debunk the “counterfeit of the great image of Christ” found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. “Christianity,” writes Hitler in Mein Kampf, “was not content with erecting an altar of its own. It had first to destroy the pagan altars.” It was “the advent of Christianity” that first unleashed the “spiritual terror” upon “the much freer ancient world.”13

Large segments of the cultural left today subscribe to similar notions.
For example, Wicca and paganism constitute the fastestgrowing religion and religious category in America, with adherents numbering anywhere from 500,000 to 5 million depending on whose
numbers you accept. If you add “New Age spirituality,” the number of Americans involved in such avocations reaches 20 million and growing. Feminists in particular have co-opted Wicca as a religion perfectly suited to their politics. Gloria Steinem is rhapsodic about the superior political and spiritual qualities of “pre-Christian” and “matriarchal” paganism. In Revolution from Within she laments in all
earnestness the “killing of nine million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women during the centuries of change-over to Christianity.”14
The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, was convinced that the antiwitch craze was an anti-German plot concocted in large part by the Catholic Church: “The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed.”15 He dedicated considerable resources for the SS to investigate the witch hunts and prove they were attempts to crush Aryan civilization and the true German faith. The SS put together what amounted to their own X-Files unit—dubbed Special Unit H (for Hexen, or “witches”)—to ferret out the truth of over thirty-three thousand cases of witch burning, in countries as far away as India and Mexico.
Indeed, most of the founders of National Socialism would be far more comfortable talking witchcraft and astrology with a bunch of crystal-worshipping vegans than attending a church social. Consider the Thule Society, named after a supposed lost race of northern peoples hinted at in ancient Greek texts. The society was founded as the Munich chapter of the German Order, and while its occult and theosophical doctrines were nominally central to its charter, the glue that held it together was racist anti-Semitism. Anton Drexler was encouraged by his mentor Dr. Paul Tafel, a leader of the Thule Society, to found the German Workers’ Party, which would soon become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Its membership was a veritable Who’s Who of founding Nazis, according to Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw.

From pages 364-365 of my book:

Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis
worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional
Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish
this was to co-opt Christianity via the Gleichschaltung
while at the same time shrinking traditional religion’s role in civil society.
To this end, Hitler was downright Bismarckian. The German
historian Götz Aly explains how Hitler purchased popularity with
lavish social welfare programs and middle-class perks, often paid for
with stolen Jewish wealth and high taxes on the rich. Hitler banned
religious charity, crippling the churches’ role as a counterweight to
the state. Clergy were put on government salary, hence subjected to
state authority. “The parsons will be made to dig their own graves,”
Hitler cackled. “They will betray their God to us. They will betray
anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.”5
Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional
Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with the Day
of the Seizure of Power.6 Each November the streets of central
Munich were dedicated to a Nazi Passion play depicting Hitler’s
Beer Hall Putsch. The martyrdom of Horst Wessel and his “old fighters”
replaced Jesus and the apostles. Plays and official histories
were rewritten to glorify pagan Aryans bravely fighting against
Christianizing foreign armies. Anticipating some feminist pseudo
history, witches became martyrs to the bloodthirsty oppression of
Christianity.

Under the progressives, the Christian God had been transformed
into the God of lower food prices. Under the Nazis, the Christian
God would be transformed into an Aryan SS officer with Hitler his
right hand. The so-called German Christian pastors preached that
“just as Jesus liberated mankind from sin and hell, so Hitler saves the
German Volk from decay.” In April 1933 the Nazi Congress of
German Christians pronounced that all churches should catechize
that “God has created me a German; Germanism is a gift of God.
God wills that I fight for Germany. War service in no way injures the
Christian conscience, but is obedience to God.”7
When some Protestant bishops visited the Fuhrer to register complaints,
Hitler’s rage got the better of him. “Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has done in Russia . . . The Germanrace has existed without Christianity for thousands of years . . . and
will continue after Christianity has disappeared . . . We must get
used to the teachings of blood and race.” When the bishops objected
that they supported Nazism’s secular aims, just not its religious innovations,
Hitler exploded: “You are traitors to the Volk. Enemies of
the Vaterland and destroyers of Germany.”8

In 1935 mandatory prayer in school was abolished, and in 1938
carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely. By 1941 religious instruction
for children fourteen years and up had been abolished altogether,
and Jacobinism reigned supreme. A Hitler Youth song rang
out from the campfires:

We are the happy Hitler Youth;
We have no need for Christian virtue;
For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor
And our redeemer.
No priest, no evil one
Can keep us
From feeling like Hitler’s children.
No Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!
Away with incense and holy water pots.9
Meanwhile, the orphans were given new lyrics to “Silent Night”:
Silent night! Holy night! All is calm, all is bright,
Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight,
Watches o’er Germany

I’ve been so incredibly swamped since the von Brunn shooting I haven’t had a chance to post a few things on Hitler and Christianity that I think are relevant given all of the “he’s a rightwinger talk.” Remember von Brunn subscribes to the view that Christianity was a Jewish conspiracy against European-Pagan vigor. This email reminded me:

Dear Jonah:

The current issue of MILITARY HISTORY QUARTERLY (summer 2009)includes an article by John H. Osborne Jr. entitled “Greek Trajedy” It is a short history of Mussolini’s botched invasion of Greece which drew in the British to keep out the Germans in one of Churchill’s Mediterranean side-shows. The British were then promptly ejected by the Nazis who took all the credit for the victory because they had essentially no help from the incompetent Italians This WWII theatre of operation is largely forgotten although it devasted Greece.

The LF nature of the following passage — which quotes Goebbel’s diaries (?) — struck me so I wanted to share for purposes of your research notes in case you never have seen this before. It describes Hitler on the occasion of the German victory over the Greek army.

’While Mussolini had raged and moaned, Hitler’s enjoyment at Churchill’s new Greek travails was marred by regret over having to devastate the country. “Athens and Rome are his meccas,” his ranking diarist, Josef Goebbels, wrote. “The Fueher is a man totally attuned to antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity …. What a difference between the benevolent, smiling Zeus and the pain-wracked, crucified Christ …. What a difference between a gloomy cathedral and a light airy ancient temple.” ‘ page 86 (ellipses in original passage in MHQ).

Right, but Nazis were Christianists and Christianists are Nazis.

Remember this from Jesse Jackson: “In South Africa, we call it apartheid. In Nazi Germany, we’d call it fascism. Here in the United States, we call it conservatism.” Or his statement that the Christian Coalition was a “strong force” in Nazi Germany?

Hilarious.

The test on the introduction is now up, over at the Voxiversity.

First, in case you didn’t know, Reihan Salam is now a blogger for NRO. I think this astoundingly good news.  Now, on to business. He writes:

Earlier this week, Will Cain very kindly asked me to participate in a series of online debates with Chris Hayes of The Nation, a leading left-of-center thinker. To his credit, Hayes describes himself as a social democrat, a political tradition that remains obscure in U.S. political discourse. Unlike left movements in Europe, the American left has traditionally had a strong individualist streak, hence the resonance of the “liberal” label that many center-left Americans now eschew in favor of “progressive.” The best book I’ve read on the origins of social democracy is Sheri Berman’s The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century, a sympathetic account that describes the movement as an outgrowth of the various revisionist movements that emerged in tension with and in opposition to Marxist orthodoxy. Another movement that emerged from the intellectual ferment of revisionism is, of course, fascism, and Jonah Golderg has vividly described the awkward relationship between these traditions at great length. Though it should go without saying that egalitarian social democracy and racial fascism are deeply different, both see the creation and cultivation of social solidarity as vitally important.

He goes on to make many fine points. I just want to offer a slight — really slight — dissent. I agree that social democracy and racial fascism are deeply different (a point I make several times in my book). And I’m grateful that Reihan actually recognizes a distinction between fascism and “racial fascism.” In the 1920s, Mussolini’s fascism was not racial (it became racial in the late 30s when Mussolini wanted to justify his North African adventures and, later, when he fully became Hitler’s stooge). The question is, how different are social democracy and non-racial fascism? The problem for many people is that they cannot imagine the possibility that fascism isn’t shorthand for racial fascism, never mind get their heads around the idea that Nazism was — and was understood at the time as — racial socialism. The word “fascist” appears twice in Mein Kampf and neither time as a meaningful label for National Socialist ideology. Meanwhile the word socialist appears nearly 200 times, if memory serves, and it is often used as an accurate description of Hitler’s preferred policies.

Regardless, I will concede that non-racial fascism and social democracy  are still different, just as social democracy and, say, Leninism are different. But few eyebrows would be raised were one to note that Leninism and social democracy share common roots and more than a few common aspirations. But when one says similar stuff about fascism and social democracy, teeth are gnashed and cloth rent.

From a reader:

Jonah,

I bought your book tonight from Borders (I plan on completing Voxiversity III).  Considering how well it is selling, it was pretty tough to find–I found one paperback copy under “Political Science” not in the prominent “New In Paperback” displays.  I’ve never had a checkout woman look at me so strangely, either, but maybe because I purchased one other item, a collector’s edition of the new Rancid double CD.  I’m guessing not too many people buy this combination.

Looking forward to reading,

I like this one:

Mr. Goldberg – There are not words that adequately express what a complete a**hole you are – what a dishonest, right-wing fraud you are .. Your sole purpose in writing the ludicrous “Liberal Fascism” is to scare people away from the laudable and constructive policies President Obama is trying to implement to improve and fix this country after the 8 years of disastrous misrule by your people .. The only danger of fascism in this country comes from the right-wing of the Republican Party – your people. Under Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bolton-Rove-Gonzales et.al., this country came as close to fascism as it ever has, and, hopefully, ever will. You are merely trying the alarm and scare tactics that the right-wing invariably turns to ..

Your points are ludicrous nonsense: our best and closest allies in the Western tradition, including Great Britain, Germany, France, Canada, most of Western Europe, Canada, and most of the industrialized world, are far more “liberal” – indeed socialist – than could ever happen in this country: and not a one of them is in any danger of fascism: you are quite simply full of sh*t on that point .. It was the great liberalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that brought us out of the Great Depression, while it was those of your ilk, your pathetic Republican predecessors in the ’30’s, that opposed the New Deal every that eventually lifted us out of that crisis. There have been countless successful exercises in the liberalism that you speciously and fraudulently try to link to liberalism. But your Dick Cheney is the closest thing to an American fascist as we’re ever produced; if wasn’t your other ancestor – Joseph McCarthy ..

Your scare tactics, your histrionic alarmism are pathetic. The only winder is how such right-wing garbage as your book gets published at all – you should consider yourself very lucky ..

Me: Any bets that this guy hasn’t read a single page of the book?

Update: Oh, I should have said that the asterisks are mine. This is a family website.

I should have also have mentioned that I started this book when Barack Obama was an obscure Illinois state senator. So I deserve every success simply for the quality of my prescience.

I’m delighted to announced that the paperback of Liberal Fascism will debut at #5 on The New York Times besteller list.

Because the list works on a weird time-delay, it will appear a week from this Sunday.

Thanks again to everyone, including the knee-jerk critics, for making it a success.

From a reader:

Jonah,

While I’m obviously generalizing, I think the following mental calculation describes the perspective of a great many liberals/leftists:

Political thought can be described as a straight line with communism occupying the far left position, fascism the far right.
While I’m in agreement with a lot of its positions I’m not a socialist. For instance, I think some income inequality is probably necessary. And while there are parts of communism that I agree with, there are also parts that I have significant misgivings about, like the relative lack of press freedom and free speech.
There is almost nothing I find appealing or I’m in agreement with when it comes to conservatism.
My own views are pretty centrist. I may lean a little to the left but there isn’t anything extreme about my politics, and besides most of the people I know have similar opinions so I must be pretty solidly in the center.

Conclusion:

If I’m in the center, and can find more common ground with communism than conservatism then conservatism must be pretty far to the right; if not exactly fascist very much in the same neighborhood.

Update: Quite a few readers wondered why I didn’t contest this. I think the reason is that I basically agree with it. I think the confusion stems from the fact that the emailer was referring to the liberal-leftist mindset rather than his own.

But I think he’s absolutely right. Liberals start from the assumption that fascism is on the right and then they fit their own biases to the political spectrum. What I Don’t Like becomes “fascist.” Things I Have Sympathy For, in whole or part, becomes left.

Update II: From the reader himself:

Jonah,

Thanks for posting my e-mail (a Navin Johnson moment!).

I think you read me correctly. I was trying to get at how pernicious the template of left (communism), right (fascism) is given that most people will tend to place themselves in or near the center (We make $750,000 a year, so we’re middle class). From that orientation a calculation of relative distance leads inevitably to placing any vigorous conservatism on the far right of the spectrum, which makes it fascist or quasi-fascist. The search for substantive differences with socialism and more serious differences with communism is a way of substantiating their position as being centrist. Hence the frequently observed denial of being a socialist despite espousing socialist views that you pointed to last week.

The above is in part why I think Oakeshott’s enterprise association/civil association categorization is so valuable (a brief explication of which can be found in the Hunter College address given for NR’s 25th anniversary and available on the archives)

Update III: It is very strange, but readers keep thing the above correspondent is talking about himself when he says “we make $750,000 …” He doesn’t. He’s characterizing a mindset.

I have every confidence that fans of my book and those otherwise interested in the issues raised by it, will find Charles Kesler’s discussion of progressivism both familiar and enlightening. Kesler overdosed on smart pills years ago, and he’s never recovered.

Update: I take issue with my friend Peter Robinson here.

Michael Moynihan has a very useful post. I’m not sure I agree with every angle of it, but I am very reluctant to disagree with him on contemporary European politics as he knows a lot more about such things than I do.

Now this is an interesting point:

Dear Mr. Goldberg:
 
Always interesting to read your posts and (some of the) reader responses.  One of the most recent, inquiring about what a “real” right-wing regime is, and how to recognize such, you characterized as a fair question.  On that I agree.  But the question originates from a fundamental ignorance about the nature of fascism, as originally conceived by its purest practitioner, Mussolini.  Mussolini, as you know, considered himself a radical, and said once (paraphrase) that he and Lenin were the only true revolutionaries in Europe.  He was a man of the left, and fascism, as so conceived in 1920s Italy, was a leftist regime.  Can there be right-wing fascists?  Sure–as long as the fundamental building blocks of authentic Mussolinian fascism are in place: corporatism, statism, a co-opting and/or subjugation rather than destruction of private property, enough nationalism and bread/circuses to keep the populace’s energy directed towards ends that don’t threaten the regime.

I think the reader is basically right. John Ralston Saul talks about how America has an “unconscious civilization” of fascism. I think he’s too Marxist, but makes the same basic point I make, which is that we’ve inherited some corporatist and fascistic arrangements without realizing it. The worst thing for the country and for conservatism would be for the Right to become complacent about these arrangements. That’s why I have my whole discussion on the “Tempting of Conservatism” and rightwing progressivism. I think there’s a real danger of having Republicans and conservatives making peace with the welfare state and simply becoming “rightwing” versions of liberals, rewarding their constituencies, imposing their values etc. (Somewhere in the book, I have a quote from FDR in which he says something like: Democratic/New Dealer control of the government was good because the good guys ran it, but it would be bad or fascistic if some other faction got in there.)

Of course, it’s still worth noting that conservatives — properly understood — who embrace statism, cease to be conservatives. But I think the reader is still getting at a real danger.

From a reader:

Jonah,
I wonder whether your campaign to properly label extremist groups might be aided by a description of what a real right-winger would be like. Any thoughts on people or groups that could properly be labelled right-wing or extreme right?

I think it’s a very good question. I don’t have a systemic answer because I think the “right” in the Anglo-American tradition has a fork in it. One branch heads off toward extreme anti-statism, the other to extreme traditionalism to the point of monarchism or some such. I think you could make a persuasive case that a serious anarcho-capitalist libertarian was a rightwing extremist. I also think you could make the case that those who want to restore the monarchy in, say, France are rightwing extremists.

Here’s a curious irony that I don’t discuss much because it just confuses people. I think you can make the case that Franco was an extreme rightwing ruler, but not a fascist. You can see why this is confusing. Franco is for many on the Left the quintessential fascist. The problem is that he was far, far closer to an authoritarian caudillo than a totalitarian fascist. Indeed, the general consensus among scholars of fascism is these days is that Franco’s Spain should not be lumped in with Fascist Italy and  Nazi Germany. Anyway, as you can imagine, that argument gets awfully complicated given the history and the label profusion in the literature.

Many critics of the book think I believe that their can’t be anything like a “bad” rightwing regime. I think this is nonsense. I’m not an anarcho-capitalist, nor am I a hyper-traditionalist, a monarchist or even in significant respects a “reactionary” save perhaps in the Marxist sense. So, at least by own standards, I’m perfectly willing to concede that extreme rightwingery can be bad. But it can’t, technically speaking, be fascist.

A reader asks:

Jonah,

I was reading your blog comments about the British National Party.

Your observation that far from being “right wing” their platform is in fact socialist seems spot on.

But I’m left asking myself;  so what?

Does it really matter whether people call them right wing loons or socialist loons when, if they had their way, people like me (and you I suppose) would have to pack our bags and move back where our ancestors came from?   (I guess that would be Israel if Obama lets the Jews keep that).

Just a thought.

Me: Well it matters for a few reasons, not least because I think it is a very interesting aspect of political life, so much so I wrote a book about it.

But more importantly, it matters because one statist faction uses another statist faction to tar  anti-statists  as fascist. The leftwing  and mainstream press in Britain (and America) routinely uses “far right” parties like the BNP to tar mainstream conservative policies. But in most ways the left has far, far more in common with the BNP than the right. Why? Because they’re both leftwing. Or, if you prefer, they’re both statist. Surely, if we should be vigilant about preventing the sort of dystopia the reader clearly fears — and we should — than at least clarifying which parties are statist and which are not is a useful project.

More on the BNP’s success at stealing labor votes. Here are some wonderful posts about the BNP by Daniel Hannan. For instance:

Incidentally, any BBC presenters reading this, why do you keep calling the party “far Right”? Weren’t you listening to Nick Griffin’s acceptance speech? He wasn’t going to talk about immigration policy he said, since everyone knew where he stood on the subject. No, his priority was to expose the way in which public assets had been privatised. Look at the BNP’s manifesto: it wants nationalisation, subsidy, higher taxes, protectionism and (sotto voce) the abolition of the monarchy. And look at where its votes came from. The BNP is a symptom of Labour’s collapse.

Plus readers might remember his interview with Vox Day:

VD:One thing that tends to confuse Americans is that the British National Party is not very popular despite holding what appear to be populist views on immigration and the European Union. Why do they enjoy so little support compared to the three major parties?

DH:Because they are, contrary to the way they are described in the BBC, a party of the far left. They’re in favor of nationalization, they’re in favor of protectionism, they want workers’ councils to run industry, they want a massive state program of rebuilding manufacture. Like Hayek said about the socialist roots of Nazism, they are a national socialist party and the socialist bit is very important to them. Plus, there is a line, a very important line in politics, between being anti-immigration and anti-immigrant. And they’ve crossed that line.

VD: In a certain respect, they really are fascists, but in the Italian Fascist sense.

DH: Yeah. I think most of these so-called “far right” parties are on the left by any normal definition. It’s a brilliant media trick in Europe to always refer to them as “the far right”. The target of that is the mainstream right. Every time you read about the BNP in the press, it’s always prefaced with “the far right BNP”, as though they were like us, but more so, which is the opposite of the case. When somebody reads that, it doesn’t make them think any worse of the BNP, it makes them think worse of the right. Which, of course, is why they do it.

The British National Party stands to gain from disaffected Labor voters.