printPaul Gottfried is a real rock star on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. His latest piece, “The Intellectual Roots of the American Left’s Emerging Totalitarianism”—read it!— mentions an upcoming book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept. Nerds have something to look forward to.
I own all Paul’s books except for Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, published by Cambridge University Press (Paul had Advance Praise for my first book).
In “The Intellectual Roots of the American Left’s Emerging Totalitarianism,” Gottfried points out, essentially, that the fascist program was tame compared to the Stalinist one:
… the Nazis, aggressive thugs as they were, had no interest in the worldwide indoctrination program dreamed of by the universalist, conversionary and egalitarian zealots of the true Left.
In contrast to the Nazis, the Left has regularly used every means at its disposal to reconstruct the human personality in accordance with its world vision. Perhaps even more significantly, for the last seventy years the Left has imagined itself as a brave force of resistance against a supposedly implacable but entirely fictitious and shape-shifting enemy— the great evil of “fascism.” As I document in my forthcoming book, Fascism: Career of a Concept, the Left’s eternal enemy of “fascism” is variously depicted as racism, Christian fanaticism, European nationalism, or even opposition to Israeli foreign policy.