From a reader:
Dear Jonah,
I’ve been following your “Liberal Fascism” blog with great interest. As a long time reader of NR and NRO, it is heartening to see a distillation of conservative thought catch on with the more general public as it seems to have done with your book. All too often, it seems conservative authors make a lot of sense (to me at least), but only the choir listens.
One thing that seems to be a guaranteed reaction on the left to this type of book is hyperventilated rhetoric full of ad-hominine attacks, straw man arguments, and a raft of logical fallacies directed at any author who challenges ‘common wisdom’ as they see it. I’ve not seem this type of reaction any more in evidence to your book, than to the line “The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Fascism”. At first, I must admit I was a little puzzled by this comparison, but after reading your explanations and thinking about the parallels, it began to make a lot of sense. It became particularly clear when you made reference to ‘White Studies’ curricula on college campuses, and led me to think of other parallels, including Hitler’s aversion to ‘Jewish Physics’ and some eerie parallels made by some liberals and in particular professors of ‘Black Studies’ courses.
I had recently finished reading Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s compilation book “The Race Card”. Your comparison of The White Man and his position as a target for Liberal Fascists as compared to Jews being a target for Nazis was eerily echoed in some of the passages from that book. Take this passage as quoted from bell hooks (her preferred un-capitalized convention) on page 165 of the book:
Most whites…do believe in ‘freedom in democracy,” and they fight to make the ideals of the Constitution an empirical reality for all. It seems that they believe that, if we just work hard enough at it, this country can be what it ought to be. But it never dawns on these do-gooders that what is wrong with America is not its failure to make the Constitution a reality for all, but rather its belief that persons can affirm whiteness and humanity at the same time. This country was founded for whites and everything that has happened in it has emerged from the white perspective….What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.
This passage appears in Horowitz’s chapter “Racism In Academia” and he labels this strain of liberalism as Afro-Nazism. Sounds remarkably similar to a ‘final solution’ proposal to me. Many of the liberal critics of “The White Man…” passage in your book point to the fact that there are no death camps full of white males who are systematically being gassed, and therefore, any comparison to Jews is absurd and offensive. But I think it is worth mentioning that before Auschwitz and Treblinka, there was the identification of the ‘Jewish Question’ and the advocacy of the need for a ‘solution’. It is most likely that another systematic ideological killing will not happen as it did under the Nazis, but this may not be for lack of a similar sentiment among some liberal fascists.
In an earlier chapter of “The Race Card”, G. J. Krupey details theories of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing as presented in “The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors” He refers to them, “…as a virtual Mein Kampf of Afrocentricity.” On page 140, Krupey writes:
Like the Nation of Islam’s theology, Welsing’s theory rests on the assumption that blacks are the original members of the “hue-man’ race, while whites are the mutant albino result of a relatively recent, spontaneous genetic mutation. These melanin-deficient misfits (melanin plays an important, mystical role in Welsing’s thinking, as will be shown later) were then driven into exile from Africa by their disdainful, melanin-enriched parents, finding refuge in what is now Europe.
In the caves and forest of darkest Europa, the whites stagnated in savagery, according to Welsing, interbreeding until all traces of their African origin disappeared. Finally, the Greeks managed to rise far enough up out of this degeneracy to steal their civilization from the black Egyptians. Then the Romans, followed by all subsequent European powers, embarked on a genocidal conquest against those who had originally rejected and exiled them and knew the secret of their shameful origin.
I would think the racial and cultural paranoia parallels in these excerpts with the Nazis would be apparent to anyone who cares to see them. And there is much more like this in the chapter, as well as through much of the book. I do not mean to take away from the importance of your work, but it must be said that “The Race Card” had many comparisons between modern liberal thought and fascism. You are not alone in seeing the similarities, but it does appear that you are among the first to make such a comprehensive argument.
Best of luck with the book,