An interesting anecdote from the thirties. I found this particularly interesting:
Political ignorance also may have hurt Heinlein’s campaign in two other ways. First, Heinlein believed that he was harmed by the fact that the Communist Party had endorsed him. Although a leftist himself at the time, Heinlein was very hostile to the communists in the 1930s, denouncing them as “red fascists” no better than the “brown fascists” of the far right.
As with Heinlein, it was clear to most at the time that fascism and communism were just two slightly different flavors of the same totalitarian political phenomenon, and much of the American left admired both. It’s only the modern left that has developed an amnesia about it (somewhat deliberately, by rewriting history in academia), declaring after the fact that they are political opposites on the simple-minded one-dimensional left-right spectrum.
I will say one thing that was worse, or at least different, about Nazism, though. This morning I heard someone from Libya saying that if reports coming out of there were accurate, that a “genocide” was going on.
No. That word has become devalued in recent decades (partly to minimize what happened to the Gypsies and Jews during the war, and as a way of reducing support for Israel). Killing lots of people is not genocide. Even ethnic cleansing in a region is not genocide. Genocide is the deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire “race” of people (while race is largely a social construct, in this case use it as shorthand for “group of people sharing a large genetic heritage”). Hitler was, I think, unique in his desire to do this. Well, except for modern Islamists.
While answering Larry’s comment regarding another recent post, I browsed this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history It is obviously incomplete, but even under the strictest definition of genocide, it shows that Hitler was not unique in his desires. There are other things that made Hitler’s genocide unique, but that’s probably both off-topic & fodder for a big argument. As for modern Islamists (ie the extremists), I think mass conversion might suffice for them.
I hadn’t recalled Patterson’s references to Henlein (though I had remembered that from previous sources) so I looked it up; sure enough, pages 205 and 211 (the books’ notes and index take up a whopping 125 pages).
In checking I re-read this:
Beverly Hills was in his district, and that sometimes posed a problem: the wealthy Hollywood types were almost all rock-ribbed Republicans.
That obviously struck me the first time I read it. (probably got lost in everything else in the book, really an outstanding work). Re-reading it still kind of knocks me over. What changes we have witnessed over the last 70 years.
If you view Libya as a collection of tribes, or even if you just think about the pre-Gaddafi Libya as Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan, maybe an attempted genocide is actually taking place. If Gaddafi decides to kill everyone in a certain tribe, or even everyone in all of Cyrenaica, it might indeed be a genocide.
Red fascists and brown fascists. This is a good description of them.
Bob-1 – Sure, I agree mass conversion of Muslims is a good idea. Trouble is, the only way this is going to work in less than centuries (and we don’t have centuries!) is mass conversion to highly ionised plasma.
Actually, some of the accepted legal definitions of genocide are a bit different than the commonly understood one.
Attempts to destroy a cultural identity, language, or religion also count, even through such measures as removing children from parents (which don’t result in the actual deaths of anyone, just the death of the parent’s culture). By that measure Qaddafi’s ban on teaching the Berber language probably counts, but then so would Islam’s insistence on punishing members of other religions via taxation and decapitaton.
Perhaps we should use a term similar to Holocaust to denote genocides that directly pursue the mass extermination of a group, as opposed to forced relocations, language bans, forced boarding schools, and the like.
The difference between a right-wing fascist and a left-wing fascist: one starts off by beating in the right side of your head, while the other begins by bashing in the the left side of your head.