LEFTIST HISTORY AND FASCISM

Being a Leftist historian must be a depressing job: So much of history upsets Leftist preconceptions. The only way out for them is to lie -- as Keith Windschuttle has repeatedly shown. The Australian historians criticized by Windschuttle are minor offenders compared with some of their colleagues in the USA and the UK, however. I have twice previously mentioned (here and here) the utter trash put out by Robert Paxton in his alleged history of Fascism. He's the guy who said Hitler was an "antisocialist" when the very name "Nazi" is a German abbreviation of "National Socialist"! The whole point to the twists and turns of Leftist historians is of course to deny that Fascism was a Leftist sect and to deny that Fascist ideas still live among modern Leftists -- things that I point out at length here. Even the Marxist Terry Eagleton admits the latter point.

I was rather amused therefore to note a good point made by Orrin Judd in his review of Paxton's book. Orrin notes that in his desperation to deny what Fascism really was, Paxton ends up defining Fascism as modern, scientific and anti-Christian. Which is of course very much how modern-day Leftists see themselves. So no matter where he turns, Paxton cannot escape the fact that the modern-day Left is in most respects the lineal descendant of Fascism. The modern Left is even becoming pretty antisemitic these days. And, as Orwell points out, modern Leftists even have their own version of nationalism. The group-minded politics of the modern American Left would not have surprised Orwell one bit. It is only conservatives who stand up for the individual.

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