Holocaust Museum killer is a Darwinian

American liberalism has become a quasi totalitarian political movement that, in totalitarian fashion, routinely employs the Big Lie to generate hatred against its opponents, or, to be more precise (since most conservatives don’t truly oppose liberalism anyway), against its chosen scapegoats. Just as President Clinton blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on Rush Limbaugh and the black church burnings on conservatives, liberals this week have said that James von Brunn, the murderer at the Holocaust Museum, is a conservative Christian. The truth, which we discuss here, is the opposite—von Brunn is a Nazi-type anti-Christian. More specifically, he is a Darwinian in the same manner that Hitler was.

However, in response to the liberals’ Big Lie about von Brunn and conservatives, mainstream conservative websites are going overboard with their own false argument, that von Brunn is not even on the right, but on the left. (See for example Ben Johnson’s article at FrontPage Magazine.) This is but the latest installment in the hackneyed, pitiful argument that Nazism is really a form of leftism, an argument that conservatives cannot let go of because they think it will clear them once and for all of the left’s charge that conservatives are Nazi-like. I’ve debated against the “Nazism is leftism” argument repeatedly over the years, and definitively refuted it here. Conservatives need to suck in their gut and accept the reality. Nazism, notwithstanding its socialist elements, is at its core an extreme and debased form of rightism, not a form of leftism.

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Terry Morris writes:

Extreme and debased form of … leftism? Sounds kind of redundant to me.

LA replies:

Yes, I actually fiddled with that phrase, and knew the wording wasn’t perfect, and figured someone would complain about it…

So:

Nazism, notwithstanding its socialist elements, is at its core an extreme and debased form of rightism, not a form of leftism.

EK writes:

LARRY YOU ARE HITTING THE BULLS EYE EVERY SHOT—

WE ARE INDEBTED TO YOU BIG TIME

A LITTLE LIGHT DISPELS A LOT OF DARKNESS

LA replies:

E.,

Your spirited encouragement gives me kick. It means a lot. Thank you.

June 14

Steve R. writes:

About a mile away from the Holocaust Museum are the offices of the Jewish neocons at the Weekly Standard. Brunn had their address in his possession and the FBI was very concerned that they might have been the next target. From everything I’ve read about this guy so far, it seems that right wing Jews, in particular, would be his likely target. Imagine he survived the Museum fight and attacked famous right wing Jews, I wonder if the left would claim he was a right wing extremist? In light of the new evidence I’d say that only the label ‘racist’ applies—neither left or right wing.

LA replies:

But Steve, the Standard is neocon—not “right-wing”—and pro-Israel. So von Brunn could have been after them because they’re pro-Israel. They also are vociferously pro-open-borders for the U.S., even explicitly in favor of illegal immigration and quite contemptuous of all advocates of border control. So he could have been targeting them for that reason. Neither motive would be a “left-wing” motive.

However, the left absurdly sees the Standard as “far-right,” because the Standard supported Bush’s hyper-Wilsonian, i.e., hyper-liberal, democratization policy, and because the left sees anything to the right of itself as far-right, just as, in the 1930s, Communists called liberals and democratic socialists “fascists.” So you’re correct, if he had attacked the Standard, the left, given their skewed view of reality, would have had a hard time calling him right-wing!

Which brings us back to your point. If he had attacked the Standard, the left would simply (and correctly) have called him an anti-Semite, while leaving out references to his “Christianity” and his “conservatism.”

Paul Mulshine writes:

And the same crowd of neocons also argues consistently that the Marxist side was the good guys in the Spanish Civil War. Stalin, you see, was really a right-winger and Franco a left-winger. [LA replies: I’m not aware of neocons taking the Loyalist side (i.e. that of the Republic, the Left, and the Stalinists) in the Spanish Civil War, let alone the Stalinist side. To the contrary, Paul Johnson’s lively and highly influential Modern Times, a kind of neoconservative revisioning of the 20th century, takes a favorable view of Franco and makes him one of the good guys in the history of the 20th century.]

This is one of those strange-but-true phenomena. My benchmark for determing whether someone is a neocon is to ask this question: Which side in that war did you think worthy of American support?

A neocon will side with the Marxists every time. They need to make an Orwellian leap to turn those old-fashioned fascists into left-wingers. The curious thing is that Orwell himself actually was on the wrong side of that war. But he wised up, to some degree at least. One of the great passages in 20th century literature occurs in “Inside the Whale,” when Orwell reports on how he met Henry Miller in Paris just before going to Spain. Miller predicted, accurately as it turned out, that there was no point in fighting because Spain would be a dictatorship for decades no matter which side won.

As it happened, of course, the right-wing dictatorship fell long before a Marxist one would have fallen.

September 15

Doug E. writes:

“Nazism, notwithstanding its socialist elements, is at its core an extreme and debased form of rightism, not a form of leftism.”

So identity politics then is a form of rightism? This evening on Hannity the Rev Sharpton said this about the Palin’s: “who is Mr. Letterman insulting as a group?”

You might want to reconsider your point.

LA replies:

Identity politics, multiculturalism, is a form of leftism, because it’s about the “outs,” the minority cultures, making themselves equal with the majority culture by destroying it as a majority culture.

Nazism is about one nation dominating others.

Yes, there are overlaps between identity politics and Nazism. But the key distinction is that multiculturalism is about achieving equality. Leftism always involves equality, just as the leftist aspect of Nazism, the socialist part of National Socialism, had to do with equality among the German people.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 13, 2009 11:59 PM | Send