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You Asked
May. 22nd, 2008 | 10:15 am
Okay, I’ve read Liberal Fascism. I was asked for my thoughts on it, and I’ve already given a few in an earlier post. Now that I’ve finished the last chapter, here’s what I think. This post is addressed to Jonah's fans.
Jonah Goldberg is lying to you. Enumerating every one of his lies would practically fill a new book, so I’ll just start here with the biggest one.
”the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand…before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States…After the war, the American progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism. Accordingly, leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as “right-wing” and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre-fascist thought.”
This is what’s called a “whopper.” First of all, anyone going through periodical archives of the 20s and 30s, anyone reading writers of that era, knows that both liberals and conservatives associated fascism with the right wing well before WWII. Travel books of the 1930s, for instance, listed the Nazi party under right wing political groups, as did liberal magazines like The New Yorker and conservative magazines like Time :
There will be 607 Deputies in the new Reichstag, largest, in German history. Simplifying the returns, it means that the Nazis and other Right Wing Parties will have a total of 277 seats." Time Magazine, 8/8/32
It took no “liberal sleight of hand” to associate fascism with the right – unless you are willing to characterize Time’s rock-ribbed Republican and conservative publisher, Henry Luce as a liberal engaging in “sleight of hand.”
( Oh yes, there's more... )
Jonah Goldberg is lying to you. Enumerating every one of his lies would practically fill a new book, so I’ll just start here with the biggest one.
”the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand…before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States…After the war, the American progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism. Accordingly, leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as “right-wing” and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre-fascist thought.”
This is what’s called a “whopper.” First of all, anyone going through periodical archives of the 20s and 30s, anyone reading writers of that era, knows that both liberals and conservatives associated fascism with the right wing well before WWII. Travel books of the 1930s, for instance, listed the Nazi party under right wing political groups, as did liberal magazines like The New Yorker and conservative magazines like Time :
There will be 607 Deputies in the new Reichstag, largest, in German history. Simplifying the returns, it means that the Nazis and other Right Wing Parties will have a total of 277 seats." Time Magazine, 8/8/32
It took no “liberal sleight of hand” to associate fascism with the right – unless you are willing to characterize Time’s rock-ribbed Republican and conservative publisher, Henry Luce as a liberal engaging in “sleight of hand.”
( Oh yes, there's more... )
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Rejection
May. 22nd, 2008 | 01:05 pm
A recent discussion on Catrambo's blog has me thinking about rejection letters. The most demoralizing one I ever got was a scrap of brown paper plainly torn from a paper bag on which was scribbled the word, "overstocked." The most perplexing was a very nice, detailed rejection letter from an editor in response to a ghost story I'd sent in which my heroine wakes up one morning to find writing on the ceiling over her bed. The editor wanted to know how the ghost could have done this without waking my main character up (presumably the rattling of the spray can should have roused her.) The most infuriating -- and the only rejection letter I was ever tempted to respond to -- was a snotty note from an editor who informed me that if I'd bothered to read the guidelines to the magazine I would have realized that they didn't accept stories with that hackneyed ending in which the narrator turns out to be dead and wouldn't have wasted the editors time...
My story didn't end that way. My story was not intended to end that way. My story had been read by many other people in my writers group, not one of whom even remotely interpreted it to end that way. This rejection letter enraged me even more than the one I got from an agent informing me that they'd "disposed of the manuscript" after I'd sent her my novel with a large and expensive SASE. I spent the week afterwards startling co-workers by muttering to myself broken phrases like, "...well, if you'd bothered to read the story..." and "...I mean, we all have bad days, but..." and "...nobody else has ever so much as suggested..." In the end, of course, I didn't reply, though I did commit her name to memory and, for a while afterwards, haunted conventions as a grim silent figure peering keenly at the name-tags of editors sitting on slush-pile panels.
My story didn't end that way. My story was not intended to end that way. My story had been read by many other people in my writers group, not one of whom even remotely interpreted it to end that way. This rejection letter enraged me even more than the one I got from an agent informing me that they'd "disposed of the manuscript" after I'd sent her my novel with a large and expensive SASE. I spent the week afterwards startling co-workers by muttering to myself broken phrases like, "...well, if you'd bothered to read the story..." and "...I mean, we all have bad days, but..." and "...nobody else has ever so much as suggested..." In the end, of course, I didn't reply, though I did commit her name to memory and, for a while afterwards, haunted conventions as a grim silent figure peering keenly at the name-tags of editors sitting on slush-pile panels.