Nazism and fascism are “right wing” movements -- the polar political
opposites of socialism. Fascists and
Nazis employ appeals to traditional morality to gain support. Progressives deplore fascism and always
have. Fascists support capitalism. Trump
is a fascist. These are aspects of The Big Lie that Dinesh D’Souza exposes
in his recently released book.
The absurd claim that fascism and Nazism are not socialist movements
owes it origin to the hideous reputations those leftist regimes earned after World
War II. How could progressives expect to
thrive in America
if the Holocaust and other atrocities were linked to its political
relatives? Consequently, a gigantic lie
was perpetrated by leftist intellectuals and slavishly spread by a sympathetic
media -- namely, that fascism was a movement of the “far right” and that
conservatives were also on “the right.” This
“big lie” has long been a staple of Democrat propaganda and the basis for the
absurd notion that President Trump is a fascist -- not his violent, GOP-assassinating,
speech-suppressing, “Antifa” opponents
Most conservatives are aware of links between fascism and
socialism. After all, the term “Nazi”
refers to a “National Socialist” party.
What many of them, and certainly most Americans, don’t know, thanks to a
mendacious media and institutions of advanced deception, are the countless ties
(centralized government, racism, eugenics, state-sanctioned violence, and
enforced cultural uniformity) that link fascists and even Nazis to the progressive
movement.
Indeed, a mutual admiration relationship existed between
Mussolini and FDR -- a romance evidenced not only by a White House-organized ticker-tape
parade for Mussolini’s aviation minister, but also by New Deal policies like
the National Recovery Administration that effectively put the American economy under
Roosevelt’s dictatorial control. Not
surprisingly, a New York Times
journalist praised FDR for following Mussolini’s example -- though the Supreme
Court, not yet cowed by FDR’s later fascistic court-packing threat, did not
cheer this unconstitutional power grab.
In 1933, FDR himself said of Mussolini, “There seems no
question he is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested
and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished…” Mussolini, for his part, was thrilled to be
called “the Italian Roosevelt.” Even
more surprising to Americans weaned on “the big lie” is the fact that Germany ’s
Nazi press frequently praised FDR in the early 30s. One magazine lauded “the fascist New Deal” in
which the central government (as in fascism) exercised substantial control over
“private” industry and finance.
Fascism itself, as D’Souza explains, arose due to the
spectacular failure of Marx’s predictions about proletarian revolutions. Mussolini and Lenin, both Marxists, proposed
different reasons for this failure, but both remained socialists dedicated to
centralized government and totalitarian societies. Thus, the bloody feud between fascism and
communism was an internecine war akin to the ongoing hostilities between Sunni
and Shiite sects within Islam.
D’Souza’s work contains
a fair amount of material also found in Jonah Goldberg’s less strident book, Liberal Fascism -- especially information
about the “proto-fascist” proclivities of the Constitution-despising Woodrow
Wilson under whose resegregated regime the “domestic terrorist arm of the
Democratic Party,” the KKK, reemerged in spectacular fashion. The Big
Lie, however, goes beyond Goldberg by linking Progressivism to Nazism via their
kindred eugenics-based racist beliefs.
D’Souza notes, for example, that Hitler’s anti-Jewish Nuremberg
laws were explicitly patterned after Democrat-instituted segregation and
anti-miscegenation laws in the South and that progressives in America
“outpaced the Nazis in initiating mass programs of forced incarceration and
forced sterilization…”
D’Souza also fully addresses a question I posed to Mr.
Goldberg after a book lecture in San Diego
-- to which question I received an unsatisfactory answer: “How did it come to
pass that fascism is commonly called ‘rightwing’?” To this query The Big Lie provides a detailed response. The leftist historian Richard Hofstadter began
this project by linking Social Darwinism
in America to capitalism -- thus transferring racist eugenics from its
progressive spawning ground to the conservative “right.” Two Germans émigrés from the Marxist
Frankfort School
Never mind that Hitler was a bohemian who despised
Christianity, that Mussolini was an atheist, or that fascists hoped to create a
new society filled with “supermen” and not suburbanites lounging in hot tubs. Ignore also the fact that fascism is a
political philosophy with a background that’s been erased by the primary
practitioners of the big lie -- academia, the media, and Hollywood . According to D’Souza, fascism’s
philosophical founder was Giovanni Gentile, an Italian who, like Mussolini
after him, moved from Marxism to fascism. Most of Gentile’s program could
easily be mistaken for any recent Democrat platform.
D’Souza correctly, in my view, sees the “resistance” to
Trump as a grave threat designed to undo America’s constitutional system and to
institute a progressive conformity of thought and action throughout the country
-- a uniformity that is already being enforced by fascistic thuggery and
intimidation at Berkeley, Middlebury College, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, talking conservative heads seem
largely oblivious to this clear and present danger.
D’Souza’s concluding “Denazification” suggestions, however,
don’t inspire confidence. How does one pass Trump’s economic agenda,
reach out to minorities, prosecute Obama-era abuses of power, or develop
alternative media and entertainment resources in today’s social and political
environment? While D’Souza has been
successful with his documentaries, one would think it will take decades to make
serious inroads into the left’s academic and media dominance. We might not have that much time. Nevertheless, D’Souza has provided
conservatives with substantial ammunition.
They need not simply scream out the window, “I’m as mad as hell…” They can also tweet, message associates, and
vigorously assert to whoever will listen, “Fascism and progressivism are both
leftist, socialist disasters! Read this book!”
Regnery Publishing, July 31, 2017 (256 pages, $17.99, Hardcover)
Richard Kirk is a
freelance writer living in Southern California
