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
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