I didn’t write the book:

Quite a few readers commented on my statements about Obama and his radical political ideas last week. Some said that I had stepped over a line and others said that my thoughts were, “ludicrous”. I guess we are all entitled to our opinions…except me of course…..

I think an honest read of Jonah Goldberg titled, “Liberal Fascism a history of The American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” might shed some light. Obviously many Americans are reading the book and I suppose they are liking it judging from the sales. Watching a leader or a party go down this path is not easy. Knowing that my fellow Americans, who I know and love, are following along in a sort of aphrodisiac stupor is sad to me. The leaders of a movement are expected to gain and retain power. I do not fault the leaders. It is our duty as citizens to beware and learn from history. I pray that Americans will study and learn from wise men like Jonah Goldberg.

Jonah Golberg’s ideas on Fascism:

On page 14 of his book you can read, “American liberalism is a totalitarian, political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying, but it is definitely totalitarian, or holistic, if you prefer, and that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and your outer appearances all have political salience for liberal fascists.” (Liberal Fascism)

on Page 55, “What Hitler got from Italian fascism was the importance of an idea that would arouse the masses.”

From an interview with Hugh Hewitt I quote these words by Mr. Goldberg. (you can read the whole interview here):

Obama, Clintion and Alinsky:

HH: Jonah, reading Liberal Fascism, I come across the recognition, I knew it, but I didn’t really confront it, that Saul Alinsky has two candidates for the Democratic nomination. And not just people who read his books, people who worked for him. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both Alinskyites.

JG: Yeah.

HH: It’s stunning.

JG: They’re both true disciples of Alinsky.

HH: Yeah.

JG: And it’s amazing. And Alinsky was obsessed with power.

HH: Yeah.

JG: Obsessed with power.

HH: A fascist, clearly a fascist, even though he would reject the title, I’m sure.

JG: Right, right. I mean, a rose by any other name.

HH: Right.

JG: If you just read what he writes about power and of winning the institutions, of crushing your enemies, I mean, he just reads like a fascist.

HH: Conflict all the time, conflict all the time.

JG: Right.

On liberalism and our children:

Right, right. That is one of the things that links today’s progressives, yesteryear’s progressives, fascists, socialists, all of them want to crack the outer shell of the sovereign family and get inside. You know, Hitler has this saying where he says I don’t care what you think, because your children belong to me. Woodrow Wilson, when he’s the president of Princeton University, he says the chief job of an educator must be to make your children as unlike you as possible. Hillary Clinton, who we’ll get to, obviously, she says in 1996 that we have to move beyond the idea that there’s any such thing as someone else’s child. And so Croly, he represents all of these ideas. He represents the idea that we need to have public-private partnerships, where government and corporations work together. The idea that we need wars for a moral tonic at home, the idea that we need to have, to get rid of individuals and laissez-faire capitalism, all this kind of stuff, almost every single thing that defines a fascist, you can find in Herbert Croly. And he remains a hero of the American left, and it’s amazing. If you read the academic literature, you’ll have some people actually say things like well, Croly may seem like a fascist, but of course he’s not, but they never explain why he’s not a fascist. I spent months trying to figure out whey they thought he wasn’t a fascist.

On H.G. Wells:

“…so in 1932, he’s asked to give a speech at Oxford on the future of liberalism. And he says all his life, he’s been trying to figure out how to sort of summarize his philosophy, which always involved these supermen, these sort of Nietzschean supermen who parachute in and run society, and do social engineering, and in some of his stories, wipe out the sort of inferior races. H.G. Wells, like almost all the Fabian socialists, and most of the American progressives, was a soaked-to-the-bone eugenicist. Anyway, so he gives this speech, and he says what liberalism needs, what progressivism needs, is to have a phoenix-like rebirth of radicalism. What it needs to become is a new, liberal fascism. And he also says if that title doesn’t work, you know, what we could also call it is enlightened Nazism. And this was not seen, I mean, it was controversial, but it was not seen as oxymoronic. It wasn’t seen as self-contradictory, because then, fascism was still seen by most as a phenomenon of the left. And he admired it for that, the same reason George Bernard Shaw and the other Fabian socialists admired it.”

On anti-capitalists:

That’s right. I mean, at some point, it seems entirely fair to take 50% of the name that makes up Nazi seriously. The national socialists were socialists. They believed in socialism. The speech that converts, that woos Adolf Hitler to the German Workers’ Socialist Party was titled “By What Means Shall Capitalism Be Eliminated?” Hitler talks about it in Mein Kampf. He explains the Nazi Party flag, which we’ve all seen in the movies as this giant red flag with a white disc in the middle…

On Hitler, religion, entrepreneurialism:

You know, a lot. I mean, there’s this real reluctance from people…the left loves having Hitler as a cudgel to use against the right. And so, you know, a lot of the response has been Goldberg can’t be true, because everyone knows that we get to use Hitler. And we get to use Hitler against our enemies, and it’s outrageous to sort of upset that apple cart. But I want to add one quick point about that, is that it’s not just…I mean, I think the socialism part alone should settle the argument in a lot of ways, but it’s important to point out it’s not just socialism. American conservatism, as you know, or Anglo-American conservatism, rests on essentially two points. On the one hand is the free market, limited government, anti-socialism belief in entrepreneurialism and all the rest. And the second part of it is an affinity for tradition, for traditional religion, orthodox religion, Christianity and the rest. And Hitler despised all of those things. He despised not only sort of the Manchester liberalism of free markets, but he also hated orthodox Christianity. He hated, he thought Christianity was a foreign import, that it ruined Germany, which had a more pure, pagan, Earth-bound faith. He hated…the one thing he liked the social Democrats for was that they got rid of the monarchy. He hated the aristocracy. He hated the established institutions at universities. He hated the experts, all of that. In every way, he was a radical that we would say, just as a Martian visiting Planet Earth, it would be obvious that this guy was on the left.

If you got this far in my post I recommend that you read the book.