Friday, June 21, 2013

TAMERLAN TSARNAEV AND WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY

The left-wing media in the US has a new meme, by which I mean a practice designed to spread its beliefs. Muslims who do bad things (e.g., jihadis, religious fanatics, and dictators), are now referred to as “conservative” Muslims. The mullahs in Iran are “conservatives,” for example, and so are the Boston Marathon bombers. Other, nicer, Muslims are called “moderates” or “liberals.” The purpose, apparently, is to connect the bad guys with “conservatives” like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson or Ted Cruz. The young, good-looking Muslims in the central square, the ones demanding elections and freedom---they are called “liberals” by CBS and CNN and the New York Times and all the rest. They're more like Joe Biden, in other words.

It's subtle. You don't notice it at first. But today, I heard it expressed more explicitly on KYW, the all-news radio station in Philly. Reporting on the election of Hasan Rowhani as Iran's new president, the newsreader described him as a “moderate” but then explained this was a relative term since the only men permitted to run for the office were “conservatives.” “It's as if all the candidates for president in this country had to be members of the Tea Party,” she explained helpfully.

Connecting foreign evil with your domestic political opponents is a tactic most famously employed by Franklin Roosevelt toward the end of World War II. In his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944, FDR looked past the war to the future of politics in America:

One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis---recently emphasized the grave dangers of 'rightist reaction' in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called "normalcy" of the 1920's—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”

This was the first time anyone had ever connected “rightist reaction” (what we would call conservatism), with fascism. Previously, fascist movements around the world were seen as socialist phenomena, and closer to communism than anything else. Germany and Italy were viewed as left-wing dictatorships.

In the early decades of the 20th Century, every Western country had a lively fascist movement, though the fascist movements in different countries often had idiosyncratic features. (Mussolini had his own peculiar racialist views, for example, but he had nothing against Jews.) In the US, the home of fascism was the Progressive movement, which embraced eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin, Jim Crow laws and the corporatist policies of the New Deal. These associations became an intolerable embarrassment for FDR and the Democrats once America went to war with European fascists and Americans came to appreciate just how evil fascist ideas could be.

Brilliantly, in this speech, FDR showed Progressives the political solution to the problem. In one stroke, fascism became a right-wing phenomenon and nice American lefties could no longer be blamed for it. And from that day to this, we have all been taught the political spectrum FDR invented. At one end is communism and at the other is fascism. From constant repetition alone, we have all come to believe that communism is a left-wing philosophy but that fascism somehow grew out of right-wing, conservative ideas.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki


No comments:

Post a Comment