Fascism was Always Leftist

Don Feder, a brilliant conservative commentator, posted an article recently which calls for a "Left Fascism Awareness Week." The article (well worth reading) describes just how totalitarian academia and other institutions of our society have become. Everything Feder writes about is valuable and true, and I have only one problem with his article: Fascism has always been on what we have come to call the "Left."

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One of the greatest intellectual crimes of our enemies--who I have called Sinisterists in my new book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie--is the deliberate manipulation of language and thought by pretending that there is an ideological spectrum of "Right" and "Left" and that moving to far to the "Right" will lead to fascism or Nazism. There is no ideological spectrum and there is no "Right." The notion of a spectrum comes from our enemies, beginning in the French Revolution when "Left" and "Right" were invented by the totalitarian revolutionaries. Just as there is no ideological spectrum, terms like "conservative," "liberal," "reactionary" and "progressive" are meaningless creations of Karl Marx, the enemy of goodness. Do not misunderstand: those people who are on what we call the "Right" today represent the good guys. But what else can we say about them? Some are pious Jews, like Feder himself. Some are devout Christians. Some are Objectivists. Some are libertarians. Some are concerned primarily with national security and others are concerned mostly with social values. All are united in their common wish to live their lives in peace, unmolested by gangs of bad guys who wear labels like "Progressive," "al-Qaida," "feminist," "environmentalist," and all the other thugs who inhabit what we might call the "Left." History, examined closely, shows us that Fascism (which held power only in Italy) was always a movement on what we have come to call the Left (not the Right.) Mussolini was a Marxist before he became a Fascist, and as a Fascist he considered Marx to be the common father of Fascism, Bolshevism and Nazism. Nazis, too, held views that were completely compatible with what we call the "Left" today: socialism, environmentalism, animal rights, victimhood status as "oppressed people," hatred of Christianity and of Judaism. The Nazis, however, never considered themselves "Fascists," which was a rival gang of Sinisterism. In fact, the Fascists were the most robust opponents of the Nazis for most of the 1930s. What does this have to do with today? History is repeating itself. That is why radical feminists are as silent about the horrors of radical Islam as the Soviets were quiet about Nazi atrocities (and vice versa) during the first two years of the Second World War. That is why militant atheists in America are also among the most likely to support militant Islam as well. People intuitively grasp that the evil we face in radical Islam is the identical evil that we face in radical feminism. What we have lacked are the words and the concepts to describe the evils we face. This is because language has been manipulated--just as the Inner Party in 1984 manipulated language to restrict the powers of though--to compel us, the good guys, to consider politics boxed in at one end by Stalin and Mao and at the other end by Hitler and Mussolini. When we think like that, the even the brightest and best minds, like Don Feder, grapple to describe what is happening on our campuses as "Left" Fascism. Imagine that Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini all held the same political views and those views were simply that power was the goal of politics and that violence and lies were the preferred method of gaining power. Would anyone doubt that those were the bad guys in our world? If there is no such thing as a "Right," then what would our enemies have to talk about? How often do the ad hominem attacks on the good guys include "Far Right Wing" or "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" or some other equally silly expression to describe those of us who simply value peace and liberty? What else can our enemies say, except that sort of meaningless name-calling? If there is no "Far Right," indeed, no "Right," then all our enemies will have to talk about is their real agenda, which is simply and solely power. Power for the sake of power. And as soon as we learn to think about politics properly, then the days of our enemies are doomed.