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Comic Books - The Superman Saga
In this article we're going to briefly comment on one of the longest running comics in history, Superman.
With the not so recent popularity of the hit TV series "Smallville" having celebrated its 100th episode with the killing off of Jonathan Kent, one can't help but think about the entire Superman legacy, not just in comics but on TV and movies as well.
Superman started off as a comic hero. The character was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1933. Jerry Siegel was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914 and was a big fan of science fiction. Shuster, who was born in 1914 in Toronto, Canada, moved to Cleveland where he met Siegel in school. The two became friends almost immediately and with similar interests, created the first Superman comic. Siegel was the writer with Shuster taking care of the artwork.
When they first submitted their idea for Superman there were no takers. Simply, nobody was interested in the idea. It wasn't until the two of them got a job working for DC Comics that they finally got the publisher to take a chance on the Superman character.
It is interesting to note that the Superboy character, on which Smallville is based, actually came later in 1945. Here we got to see how Clark Kent grew up into a man and ultimately lost his father, the last big event in his life before he moved to Metropolis and took on the role of Superman.
Because of failing eyesight, Shuster only drew the character of Superman through 1947. At that time he and Siegel left DC Comics to work on another comic book, Funnyman, which never really took off. But it didn't matter. Shuster's name was forever etched in comic book history. He eventually died of heart failure in 1992.
Siegel's story is an even sadder one. After leaving DC Comics in 1947, he was later told he could come back in the mid 1950's under the condition that he denied being one of the creators of Superman. He agreed and came back to work at DC where he produced more Superman comics from 1959 to 1965. However, most of his original stories of the time period which included the Lex Luther story and the Death of Superman remain uncredited to him.
Over the years the powers that be at DC Comics have seen fit to redefine Superman's powers and origin a number of times. There were periods of time where long time followers of the saga could no longer follow what was going on. The comic has become muddled and confusing with contradictions galore.
Gradually it became accepted by the public, reluctantly, that each decade of Superman was a different telling of the story with different origins and outcomes. This was an attempt to keep the character fresh and up to date with current technology. This is strongly evidenced by the Smallville series which is obviously taking place in modern times with all the current pop references in place. The comic book has also followed this course.
No doubt Superman will continue to evolve as the years go by. But as long as the character himself retains his basic concept of fighting for truth, justice and the American way, more likely than not, Superman will never die. Well, at least if he does he won't stay dead.
About the Author
Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Comic Books
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Toyota Corolla and Geo/Chev Prizm Auto Repair Manual 93-02 (Haynes Manuals)
Toyota Corolla and Geo/Chev Prizm Auto Repair Manual 93-02 (Haynes Manuals)
Manuals for the Do-it-yourselfer. All Haynes manuals explain how to carryout routine maintenance, restoration and servicing of cars and motorcycles, and are aimed primarily at the Do-it-yourselfer
Customer Review: Great
I wanted to know more about my 2000 Corolla. This book gives you mostly clear instructions on how to replace components of your car. I wish I could compare it to Chilton's version of the car.
Customer Review: Haynes Repair Manual
The Haynes Repair Manuals are well worth the money. Keep in mind these are not as detailed as the auto manufacturer's service manuals, but of course you are only paying a fraction of the cost as the manufacturer's service manuals. These manual include most anything a weekend mechanic needs. They include several photos of repair procedures, tune-up specifications, torque specifications and electrical wiring diagrams for your vehicle. There are times the Haynes manuals lack some detail of your vehicle, but overall they are a good buy. I would recommended these manuals for most people. I always buy one for every vehicle I own.
Sweet Pea Record Book
Sweet Pea Record Book
Customer Review: excellent memories book
the book is so cute! it's orange and green - not pink and green like it looks in the picture. you can put tons of pictures in it, there are tons of pages for dates that are important... an excellent book to keep all of babies memories in. I bought a carters one for my first kid and then this one for the second. i love them both and they are very similar, but i loved this ones colors more.
Customer Review: Love it!
I love this baby book! It is everything I was looking for. Really nice quality and lots of space to write in facts and for pictures. The only issue I have is that in the picture it looks pink and when it arrived it is actually light green on the right side and the gingham on the spine is a peachy coral. Still it's really cute, but if the color is really important to you, be aware.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Talibans backyard
Anyone who despairs of the individuals power to change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless mountaineer who, following a 1993 climb of Pakistans treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built fifty-five schoolsespecially for girlsthat offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. As it chronicles Mortensons quest, which has brought him into conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending Americans, Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.
Customer Review: A MUST READ!
Truly inspiring. I'm trying to think of how to get our country's leaders to read this amazing book. It spoke to me, as I have long believed that terrorism must be fought with education, giving people of the world hope and the means to achieve a better life. I hope that all the others who have reviewed this book have been moved to make a contribution to this very worthy cause, as I have!
Customer Review: A "must-read"
This book is a "must read" for anyone who is serious about trying to understand what is happening (and what can happen) in the name of promoting peace in the world. This book is well-written and significant.
The Aristocats (Special Edition)
The Aristocats (Special Edition)
This enchanting tale begins in Paris, when a kind and eccentric millionairess wills her entire estate to her family a family of adorable high-society cats. But when Edgar, the greedy butler, overhears her plan, he catnaps Duchess, the elegant, soft-spoken mother, and her three mischievous kittens and abandons them in the French countryside. Soon, they re being escorted home by the charming Thomas O Malley, a rough-and-tumble alley cat, who takes them to his pad along the way, where Scat Cat and his band of swingin jazz cats perform the memorable Ev rybody Wants To Be A Cat. Enriched by highstyle Disney animation (The New Yorker) and toe-tapping music by Academy Award® winning songwriters the Sherman brothers, The Aristocats is a timeless treasure and the last animated feature to get the nod from Walt Disney himself.
Customer Review: Aristocats
We had the old VHS version and had been waiting for Disney to release a DVD version. Somehow we missed it so we were super glad that Amazon had a brand new copy for sale. This has been a family favorite for years and we really missed owning a copy. We're very happy with our purchase.
Customer Review: BEST IMAGE SHORT OF TRUE HI-DEF!
Nostalgic artists' views of pre-WWI Paris and the French countryside are the backdrop for this sweet Disney classic. The colors and crispness of image on this DVD are truly amazing. I would love to see this movie on Blu-Ray. It is hard to imagine this film looked much better in the theater. The story is the tried and true Disney formula of separation and struggle to be reunited. Innocent enough for the youngest kids, this movie has plenty to offer their parents. It is a shame there aren't six stars for a film like this. The DVD also lets you isolate the songs and skip everything else. It's like buying a separate soundtrack disc but with full animation. I'd like to see this feature on ALL musical movie DVD's.
Cake Decorating Course 1: Discover Cake Decorating
Cake Decorating Course 1: Discover Cake Decorating
Student guide for Wilton's cake decorating course 1: Discover Cake Decorating. .
48 pages, softcover.
Intended for participants in Wilton's cake decorating course 1 classes, but may also be used as a self-study guide.
Customer Review: A must have for the novice
If you have never decorated then this is a must have book. It shows you how to make frosting, fill pastry bags, and talks about the decorating tips you will need. It is very easy to understand for someone who have never decorated a cake. This is the perfect book to get your decorating hands going.
Customer Review: take the course with it, prepare to shell out more $$ for tools
I just begin a Wilton cake decorating class #1 at Michael's, and this book comes FREE with the class which is $18 (instructor says these course books should retail about $3-5 at most).
You should take the class in addition to read this book, the experience of live teaching by an experienced instructor is invaluable. During this class, you will learn the beginner cake decoration techniques. It's a lot of fun, and if you don't want to proceed onto course II or III, it should be fine with just decorating your average cupcake, cookies and basic cakes. [[though most people love it so much that they do advance on..]]
however, I do have to caution that the course I tool kit you can buy ($19.99 @ Michael's) is only the bare minimum, it does not have all the things you will need for the first class. so be prepared to develop this hobby and pay more (~$20-40 depending on what you want) for other tool/tips/bags....
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Eckhart Tolle is emerging as one of today's most inspiring teachers. In The Power of Now, already a word-of-mouth bestseller in Canada, the author describes his transition from despair to self-realization soon after his 29th birthday. Tolle took another ten years to understand this transformation, during which time he evolved a philosophy that has parallels in Buddhism, relaxation techniques, and meditation theory but is also eminently practical. In The Power of Now he shows readers how to recognize themselves as the creators of their own pain, and how to have a pain-free existence by living fully in the present. Accessing the deepest self, the true self, can be learned, he says, by freeing ourselves from the conflicting, unreasonable demands of the mind and living present, fully, and intensely, in the Now.
Customer Review: Powerful Clarity and Pragmatic Wisdom
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual classic, bestseller and translated into over 30 languages. It was awarded a member of Oprah's Book Club. Eckhart's newer book, A New Earth, is presently the newest addition to the Oprah Book Club. Oprah and Eckhart are currently offering a ten week online class that is accessible for free registration at Oprah's website. The first class was enjoyed by 700,000 people worldwide, from 139 countries and represented by all fifty states in the U.S.
Eckhart was born in Germany and graduated from the University of London. He became a research scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University. At 29 years old, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation that dissolved his identity as he had previously known it. This began an intense inward journey that radically changed the course of his life. He now teaches worldwide and lives in Vancouver, BC.
He is not aligned with any particular religion and yet his message does not exclude any doctrine or dogma. He is communicating that there is a simple and pragmatic way out of suffering into enduring peace.
Power of Now is a guide to breaking free of the ego, the mind-made self, with all of its problems and conflicts. Eckhart finely dissects the ego's characteristics so that we become more conscious of how it operates. Who we are is beyond thought, emotion and form. Yet our body is the portal through which we enter a new reality to realize harmony, peace and joy. He encourages us to become more aware of the silence and space all around us and then points to inner space and stillness. Through becoming more conscious, we find that we can be free of psychological pain and open to our authentic power.
Power of Now is divided into 10 chapters with 191 pages. The Preface is written by Marc Allen, New World Library and the Foreword is by Russell Dicarlo, author of Towards a New World View.
In the Introduction, Eckhart shares the origin of the book and that the truth of who we really are lies within us. Chapter One is a study of the mind; the greatest obstacle to enlightenment. Through still attention, we can discover that we are not what we are thinking. He defines enlightenment as rising above thought and that emotion is the body's reaction to our thinking.
Chapter Two begins leading us out of psychological pain by pointing to consciousness. He offers keys to unlock accumulated pain of the past and introduces us to the collective pain body that is suffering and constantly trying to feed on more pain. Since the mind-made self believes that its identity lies within its individuality, it is on constant search to complete itself through people, things and circumstances. He shares that ego's entire search for happiness is really a search for wholeness.
In Chapter Three, we move deeply into the Now, the dimension that is free of time and demonstrates that nothing truly exists outside this present moment. He offers the key to the spiritual dimension and how to access the Power of Now. All suffering has its root in psychological time. Eckhart masterfully guides us in a clear and pragmatic manner into the joy of being.
Chapter Four offers the mind strategies for avoiding the now and that it is delusion to think that we can ever be apart from it. He discusses the manner in which we dissolve unhappiness and ordinary unconsciousness to discover the inner purpose of our life's journey. In Chapter Five, he leads us to the state of presence and to realize pure consciousness; our divine Reality.
Chapter Six is a journey into the inner body, where we find an invisible and indestructible reality that is beyond our thinking. He shares how we can also physiological benefit by being present; such as slowing the aging process and strenthening the immume system.
In Chapter Seven, Eckhart offers portals through which we may discover the inner unmanifest that is deep within our bodies such as dreamless sleep, silence, and space.
Eckhart Tolle shifts to Enlightened Relationships in Chapter Eight and we begin to arise about relationships that cycle between relative love and hate. Our relationships and indeed our intimate partners are excellent teachers and a perfect spiritual practice to learn how to live in a deeper state of presence. He encourages you to give up the relationship with yourself, the false sense of self that is the ego.
In Chapter Nine, we discover that beyond the duality and cycling between happiness and unhappiness, there is peace. We notice the impermanence of the cycling, end the emotional drama, discover true compassion and move toward a new order of Reality.
The final Chapter Ten presents the meaning of surrender so that we are able to live in acceptance of this moment just as it is. We shift from mind energy to spiritual energy, while we transform suffering into peace.
Over twenty years ago, I awakened spontaneously and had no idea what had occurred. Many years later, I was fortunate to become friends with Eckhart before the publishing of The Power of Now. In fact, Eckhart encouraged the writing of my new book, Awake Joy. I would just like to underline the fact that you have the opportunity for a radical transformation in your life and that this awakening is the answer to enduring peace. It is the end of suffering for you, your family and the world.
Customer Review: However, for a five star inspirational and remarkably candid recounting
I recommend That's How the Light Gets In: Memoir of a Psychiatrist by Susan Rako, M.D. The title comes from a song by Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Rako faced the "now" in her life with courage and integrity. Her book is wonderfully well-written and a great read. The writing just flows.
The Halo Graphic Novel
The Halo Graphic Novel
Marvel and Bungie team up to create The Halo Graphic Novel HC based on the best-selling video game. The graphic novel brings the Halo universe to life for the first time in the sequential art medium in a 128-page, full color, high quality, jacketed, hardcover graphic novel. Stories include: "Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor" by Simon Bisley and Lee Hammock. When communications from a Covenant agricultural support ship are mysteriously terminated, an Elite Commander and his squad of Special Forces are sent to investigate. In "Armor Testing" by Ed Lee and Jay Faerber, the only way to test Spartan armor, is to send a Spartan. The question is what's really being tested? In Tsutomo Nihei's "Breaking Quarantine," the untold tale of Sergeant Johnson's escape from the clutches of the Flood menace is revealed! Finally, Moebius and Brett Lewis' "Second Sunrise Over New Mombasa" tells of the subtler, more dangerous fights taking place on the streets of New Mombasa and in the hearts and minds of men. Cover by Phil Hale. Gallery art created a number of elite artists including Rick Berry, Geof Darrow, Scott Fischer, Sterling Hundley, Craig Mullins, George Pratt, Juan Ramirez, George Staples, Justin Sweet, John Van Fleet and Kent Williams.
Customer Review: Halo idelism in cognitive junctures of corbalitive conclusions
From an outsider's standpoint looking in, they say one should never judge a book by it's cover but I will do as such nonpussed because the dynamics of the combative format is such that of such exclusite artful review that need I say more??
Customer Review: Disappointing
As a hardcore Halo fan, this is just downright disappointing. None of the stories follow Master Cheif, or Captain Keyes, or anyone remotely recognizable from the Halo universe except Sergeant Avery Johnson. The story with Sergeant Johnson is the only one worth viewing. This is an ok gift idea for someone you know who enjoys all things Halo, but if you really wanna get them something of value, go with one of the real novels instead.
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?
Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.
Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.
Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.
Customer Review: Enough is Enough!!!!
I'M AM SICK & TIRED OF THE RIGHT VILLIFING EVERY LIBERAL! WE WERE'NT THE ONE'S THAT LEAKED A CIA AGENTS NAME, WE WERE'NT THE ONES THAT LIED GETING INTO THE WAR, & GETTING OUR TROOPS KILLED, WE WERE'NT THE ONE THAT TURNED OUR BACK ON KATRINA VICTUMS & VETS AT WALTER REED, & WE WERE'NT THE ONES THAT BULLIED 911 WIDOWS. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Customer Review: American Fascism: Progressives, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Useful Historical Idiots
"History is written by the winners." So goes the discipline-denigrating cliché. A more accurate observation, as Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism, suggests, is that history is written by historians--and especially, in recent decades, by academics whose biases predispose them to serve as useful idiots for Joseph Stalin's defunct propaganda ministry. Though Goldberg's well-researched book doesn't focus minute attention on the culpability of leftist historians, it does provide convenient targets (Richard Hofstadter and William Shirer) who might be blamed for abetting the greatest intellectual ruse of the twentieth century--the absurd designation of fascism as an ideology of the political right.
Anyone looking for Coulteresque theater in Goldberg's work (the product of four years' labor) will be disappointed. The book isn't meant to toss "f-bombs" at liberals the way liberals regularly toss that seven-letter epithet at conservatives. Indeed, Goldberg reiterates again and again that he doesn't employ the word "fascism" as a synonym for Nazism, racism, or "evil." Rather, he uses the term to label a method of governing that expressed itself differently in different countries. Given that caveat, anyone who chooses to read this engrossing analysis of the origins of fascism will likely be rewarded with a paradigm-shifting experience that puts the history of the twentieth century in a new light--a history that places Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt in the same political neighborhood as Benito Mussolini.
The story of fascism, Goldberg notes, begins with the "holistic" philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau and his revolutionary progeny--men whose boundless conception of national communion (via a general will) led to the odd idea that dissidents would be "forced to be free"--a fate more benign than the guillotine that "freed" enemies of the state from error during the French Reign of Terror. Hegel's philosophy, where the state incarnates God's work in history, provides another piece of the ancestral puzzle, while Nietzsche's romantic and relativistic "will to power" adds a third leg to fascism's Continental heritage. A fourth progenitor was Otto von Bismarck, whose comprehensive welfare package for the new German Empire provided Western intellectuals with a top-down model of social policy that they yearned to replicate.
These historical connections aren't exceptionally novel, but the American branches of fascism's genealogical tree are unexpected--limbs that include the pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey as well as political writers like Henry George (Progress and Poverty), Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), and Herbert Croly (The Promise of American Life). Drawing on these and other sources, Goldberg not only shows that European fascism is a product of the political left, he also argues persuasively that America's version of that system is rooted in the Progressive movement and was first given national expression in the war socialism of Woodrow Wilson.
Not surprisingly, Goldberg's first two chapters are devoted to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. But contrary to the impression given by pop-history, Mussolini isn't relegated to the status of an absurd fifth wheel. Instead, Il Duce's role as the "Father of Fascism" is clearly laid out. The portrait of his rise to power in 1922--more than a decade before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany--is the story of an intellectual whose communist sympathies were developed from infancy. (Even his given names, Benito Amilcare Andrea, conjured up leftist heroes from the past.) Those socialist sentiments remained with Mussolini to the day of his death--alongside his obsession with sexual conquest and his contempt for Christianity.
As Goldberg notes, Mussolini's state-centered, anti-capitalist rhetoric could only be declared "right-wing" by ideologues who were fighting over the same political bone. In other words, it was the internecine struggle between fascists and communists that gave birth to the longstanding practice of separating the terms "fascist" and "socialist." This linguistic divorce was mandated by Stalin to stigmatize the socialist heresy Mussolini promoted in light of his comrades' nationalistic response to World War I.
Goldberg also emphasizes that fascism itself varied from nation to nation. Most significantly, the Jew-hatred that characterized Hitler's regime wasn't integral to Italian Fascism--a movement that included a disproportionate number of Jews. Indeed, Mussolini scoffed at the Aryan myth that animated German Nazism, preferring for his part to play the role of a latter-day Caesar who was destined to resurrect Rome's ancient greatness.
The most unexpected part of Goldberg's Mussolini portrait is the way the Italian leader was hailed in American Progressive circles (e.g. in issues of Herbert Croly's New Republic) and in American pop-culture. Even as late as 1934, Cole Porter's song, "You're the Top," exhibited this adulatory attitude toward the Italian idol. Only after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935 did this admiration begin to wane. Significantly, the American President that Mussolini praised effusively in 1919, three years before his march on Rome, was Woodrow Wilson.
As far as Hitler's left-wing credentials are concerned, Goldberg's discussion of the Nazi Party Platform does a good job of demonstrating that the word "socialist" in National Socialist wasn't mere window dressing. After summarizing that ambitious document, Goldberg offers this sarcastic conclusion:
"Ah, yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!"
Analysis of the groups from which Nazism drew its support also shows that corporations weren't (as Moscow insisted) pulling strings behind the scene. Rather, Nazism emerged as a populist movement that was so cash-strapped Hitler frequently rode to rallies "in the back of an old pickup." As the historian Henry Ashby Turner concludes, corporate funding of the Nazi party was "at best" of "marginal significance." Were it not for decades of leftist disinformation, that conclusion would have been a foregone conclusion, given the virulently anti-capitalist language of Mein Kampf--language Hitler still employed in 1941. In short, Goldberg provides extensive evidence that Hitler's political program was just as "right-wing" as the politics of Leon Trotsky--whom Stalin also labeled a "fascist."
It is one thing to assert that fascism is a product of the political left--one of the "heresies of socialism" according to Harvard Professor Richard Pipes. It is something else to argue that fascism has its own American expression that grew out of the Progressive political tradition and that "Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century's first fascist dictator." That, however, is precisely the proposition put forward in Goldberg's third chapter: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism.
To bolster this hypothesis, Goldberg highlights connections between the intellectual milieu that fostered fascism in Europe and the milieu that begat American Progressivism. Henry George's Progress and Poverty, for example, was received enthusiastically in Europe where it helped to shape populist and socialist economic theory. Similarly, Edward Bellamy's utopian vision in Looking Backward (where a single municipal umbrella would one day shield all Bostonians from the rain) drew inspiration from Bismarck's top-down political example in Germany. These and other "holistic" visions of society fed into an American Progressive movement whose moral energy was derived largely from legions of Social Gospelers. As Goldberg notes, the party's 1912 presidential convention was described in the New York Times as a "convention of fanatics" and "religious enthusiasts." This fusion of social reform and religious fervor is central to what Goldberg calls "liberal fascism."
On the philosophical side of the ledger, American Progressivism looked to William James, John Dewey, and Charles Darwin. The former duo provided a relativistic and pragmatic outlook that coincided nicely with bold social experimentation. Dewey, in particular, advocated an "organic" Darwinian approach to society that consigned American individualism to the dustbin of evolutionary history. Darwinism also brought to the Progressive project a focus on racist genetics that (alongside the movement's militant imperialism) subsequent historians have been eager to forget. Furthermore, the polite moral relativism of James and Dewey echoed the unequivocal relativism expressed by Nietzsche (whose philosophy, according to H. L. Mencken, Theodore Roosevelt had swallowed whole). Finally, the attachment of elite progressives to Hegel's political philosophy (Goldberg notes that Woodrow Wilson "even invoked Hegel in a love letter to his wife.") reinforced the idea that society is an organic whole and that reformers are, quite literally, God's instruments on earth.
Woodrow Wilson is the unexpected villain of Liberal Fascism. Based on a review of his academic writings, Goldberg demonstrates that Wilson was a devotee of power--power utilized according to the pragmatic lights of John Dewey. Consequently, the twenty-eighth president denigrated, with the confidence of a divinely anointed leader, those constitutional provisions that limited his ability to mold the nation into a healthy organism that worked for the good of all. This "evolutionary" vision of history provided the intellectual justification for that modern legal theory that dissolves all governmental boundaries--the living Constitution. It also paved the way for an approach to education that transferred the locus of pedagogical authority from parents to the state. In Professor Wilson's words: "Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life...[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can."
World War I gave President Wilson the crisis he needed to implement the top-down vision of social coordination he had written about for decades. Government instruments employed in this massive effort (whose only near precedent was Lincoln's response to the Civil War) included the War Industries Board, a vigorous and widespread propaganda ministry, and a justice department that, Goldberg notes, presided over the arrest and jailing of more dissidents than Mussolini incarcerated during the entire 1920s. From censorship, to price-fixing, to Palmer raids, to patriotic nursery rhymes designed for toddlers, mobilization gave Wilson's government unprecedented access to and control over people's lives. This whipping of individualistic Americans into collective shape was cheered by progressives like Walter Lippmann who saw in the war an opportunity to bring about a Nietzschean "transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect." No wonder Warren Harding won the presidency in 1920 with a campaign that promised a return to "normalcy."
With the advent of the Great Depression, Progressives were given an opportunity to reprise the coordination achieved under Wilson's war socialism. The British journalist Alistair Cooke doubtless turned many heads when, in the 1970s, he announced on his popular PBS history series that America under FDR "flirted with National Socialism." Goldberg argues that the amorous relationship was a good deal more intimate--a relationship fanned by the populist hot air that emanated from Father Coughlin and Senator Huey Long and consummated by many of the individuals that ran Wilson's war agencies. A prime example of these fascist retreads was Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, whose "sock in the nose" style at the National Recovery Administration doubtless drew positive reviews from one of FDR's early admirers, Benito Mussolini. Even Germany's new Fuhrer had words of praise for the government-business partnerships that typified Roosevelt's New Deal.
The expansion of government under Franklin Roosevelt is well known. What isn't acknowledged in polite historical circles, as Goldberg notes, is how "the fascist flavor of the New Deal was not only regularly discussed" but even "cited in Roosevelt's favor." Why this inconvenient fact was dropped down the historical memory hole is clear. Leftist historians had no desire to link the paragon of modern "liberalism" with "right-wing" fascism. Stated more honestly, they didn't want to acknowledge that fascism was a left- wing philosophy and expose the ongoing historical ruse that kept conservatives (i.e. classical liberals) off balance.
The remainder of Goldberg's book (more than half) discusses progressivism's third wave of influence on American life in the 1960s and explains how its fascist traits have been incorporated into modern "liberalism." While not as narrowly focused as his first four chapters, these materials do give further definition to the concept of "liberal fascism"--a phrase coined in 1932 by H. G. Wells to promote an ambitious "liberal" variant of Europe's burgeoning political system.
Among the concepts that Goldberg identifies as integral to sixties radicalism are these: the romantic embrace of youthful impulsiveness and sexuality, the denigration of reason and tradition, the extension of politics into all areas of life, the exaltation of identity politics (initially in terms of race and gender), and the justification of violence committed by revolutionaries intent on creating a mythical heaven on earth (e.g. the Black Panthers). All these themes, Goldberg notes, have significant corollaries in the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany.
What separates these 60s street radicals from Great Society and contemporary progressives, however, is the smothering maternalism that characterizes the latter groups. Today's "liberal fascists," unlike their European and turn-of-the-century American forebears, promote a religion of the state that is non-militaristic. As such, it resembles Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, not George Orwell's 1984. No better example of this smothering maternalism exists than Hillary Clinton's magnum opus, It Takes A Village--a mythical world where helpful government programs cover the social landscape and where repetitive video messages inculcate useful parenting tips "any place where people gather and have to wait."
Another Goldberg chapter, Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine, shows how "eugenics lay at the heart of the progressive enterprise"--an assertion backed by historian Edwin Black, who noted that the eugenic crusade was "created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune." This embarrassing skeleton in the Progressive closet is compared with the implicit pro-abortion subtext in the best-selling book, Freakonomics--namely, "fewer blacks, less crime."
Regrettably, Goldberg's final chapter, The New Age: We're All Fascists Now, begins to treat fascist traits so eclectically that the precision and focus of earlier chapters is lost. Looking for fascist themes in Dirty Harry and Whole Foods Market is a bit like searching for grandmother's features in little Ricky's newborn mug. One is bound to find something, but isolated traits don't amount to a close likeness. A similar critique applies to Goldberg's afterword, The Tempting of Conservatism, where playing (perhaps badly) at the only governmental game in town seems to be confused with religious devotion to the political Weltanschauung exhibited in It Takes A Village.
Despite these end-of-book drawbacks, Goldberg has produced a popular book of rare historical depth and quality--a book that promises to scrap those ridiculous history-class charts that put democracy midway between "socialism" on the left and "fascism" on the right, then justify their totalitarian extremes by bending the linear ends into a globe where left and right magically "meet."
An old Soviet joke asserted that loyal comrades know the future; it's only the past that keeps changing. With Goldberg's assistance, Americans can begin to rewrite their own political history, this time putting the "fascist" label where it belongs. That single alteration would be a momentous accomplishment--one that would make the architects of democracy's future more sure-handed.
Review by Richard Kirk
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer and a regular columnist for San Diego's North County Times. His book reviews have appeared in American Spectator Online, Touchstone, The American Enterprise, and First Things. See his blog, Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer.
math books in the news
Parents urged to keep kids learning during the summer break from ... - MLive.com
Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:56:23 GMT
Parents urged to keep kids learning during the summer break from ... MLive.com, MI - ... 10; and Rebecca, 12, are also spending time working at home on school-promoted activity books, which focus on reading, writing, math and language arts. ... |
Book Review: Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook by Tim Patrick and John Clark Craig
Thu, 16 Nov 2006 05:05:06 GMT
… math, dates, arrays, multimedia, printing, databases web development, and more. Each section contains between fifteen and forty-five solutions. Each recipe contains an explanation of the problem, a solution to the …
Book Review: Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit
Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:59:26 GMT
… math and physics. I had to read through the first half of the book twice in order to get a decent understanding of the ideas being thrown out. Much of …
A math books Artilce for Your Viewing
Comic Books - The Superman Saga
In this article we're going to briefly comment on one of the longest running comics in history, Superman.
With the not so recent popularity of the hit TV series "Smallville" having celebrated its 100th episode with the killing off of Jonathan Kent, one can't help but think about the entire Superman legacy, not just in comics but on TV and movies as well.
Superman started off as a comic hero. The character was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1933. Jerry Siegel was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914 and was a big fan of science fiction. Shuster, who was born in 1914 in Toronto, Canada, moved to Cleveland where he met Siegel in school. The two became friends almost immediately and with similar interests, created the first Superman comic. Siegel was the writer with Shuster taking care of the artwork.
When they first submitted their idea for Superman there were no takers. Simply, nobody was interested in the idea. It wasn't until the two of them got a job working for DC Comics that they finally got the publisher to take a chance on the Superman character.
It is interesting to note that the Superboy character, on which Smallville is based, actually came later in 1945. Here we got to see how Clark Kent grew up into a man and ultimately lost his father, the last big event in his life before he moved to Metropolis and took on the role of Superman.
Because of failing eyesight, Shuster only drew the character of Superman through 1947. At that time he and Siegel left DC Comics to work on another comic book, Funnyman, which never really took off. But it didn't matter. Shuster's name was forever etched in comic book history. He eventually died of heart failure in 1992.
Siegel's story is an even sadder one. After leaving DC Comics in 1947, he was later told he could come back in the mid 1950's under the condition that he denied being one of the creators of Superman. He agreed and came back to work at DC where he produced more Superman comics from 1959 to 1965. However, most of his original stories of the time period which included the Lex Luther story and the Death of Superman remain uncredited to him.
Over the years the powers that be at DC Comics have seen fit to redefine Superman's powers and origin a number of times. There were periods of time where long time followers of the saga could no longer follow what was going on. The comic has become muddled and confusing with contradictions galore.
Gradually it became accepted by the public, reluctantly, that each decade of Superman was a different telling of the story with different origins and outcomes. This was an attempt to keep the character fresh and up to date with current technology. This is strongly evidenced by the Smallville series which is obviously taking place in modern times with all the current pop references in place. The comic book has also followed this course.
No doubt Superman will continue to evolve as the years go by. But as long as the character himself retains his basic concept of fighting for truth, justice and the American way, more likely than not, Superman will never die. Well, at least if he does he won't stay dead.
About the Author
Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Comic Books
math books Items For Viewing
Toyota Corolla and Geo/Chev Prizm Auto Repair Manual 93-02 (Haynes Manuals)
Toyota Corolla and Geo/Chev Prizm Auto Repair Manual 93-02 (Haynes Manuals)
Manuals for the Do-it-yourselfer. All Haynes manuals explain how to carryout routine maintenance, restoration and servicing of cars and motorcycles, and are aimed primarily at the Do-it-yourselfer
Customer Review: Great
I wanted to know more about my 2000 Corolla. This book gives you mostly clear instructions on how to replace components of your car. I wish I could compare it to Chilton's version of the car.
Customer Review: Haynes Repair Manual
The Haynes Repair Manuals are well worth the money. Keep in mind these are not as detailed as the auto manufacturer's service manuals, but of course you are only paying a fraction of the cost as the manufacturer's service manuals. These manual include most anything a weekend mechanic needs. They include several photos of repair procedures, tune-up specifications, torque specifications and electrical wiring diagrams for your vehicle. There are times the Haynes manuals lack some detail of your vehicle, but overall they are a good buy. I would recommended these manuals for most people. I always buy one for every vehicle I own.
Sweet Pea Record Book
Sweet Pea Record Book
Customer Review: excellent memories book
the book is so cute! it's orange and green - not pink and green like it looks in the picture. you can put tons of pictures in it, there are tons of pages for dates that are important... an excellent book to keep all of babies memories in. I bought a carters one for my first kid and then this one for the second. i love them both and they are very similar, but i loved this ones colors more.
Customer Review: Love it!
I love this baby book! It is everything I was looking for. Really nice quality and lots of space to write in facts and for pictures. The only issue I have is that in the picture it looks pink and when it arrived it is actually light green on the right side and the gingham on the spine is a peachy coral. Still it's really cute, but if the color is really important to you, be aware.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Talibans backyard
Anyone who despairs of the individuals power to change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless mountaineer who, following a 1993 climb of Pakistans treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built fifty-five schoolsespecially for girlsthat offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. As it chronicles Mortensons quest, which has brought him into conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending Americans, Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.
Customer Review: A MUST READ!
Truly inspiring. I'm trying to think of how to get our country's leaders to read this amazing book. It spoke to me, as I have long believed that terrorism must be fought with education, giving people of the world hope and the means to achieve a better life. I hope that all the others who have reviewed this book have been moved to make a contribution to this very worthy cause, as I have!
Customer Review: A "must-read"
This book is a "must read" for anyone who is serious about trying to understand what is happening (and what can happen) in the name of promoting peace in the world. This book is well-written and significant.
The Aristocats (Special Edition)
The Aristocats (Special Edition)
This enchanting tale begins in Paris, when a kind and eccentric millionairess wills her entire estate to her family a family of adorable high-society cats. But when Edgar, the greedy butler, overhears her plan, he catnaps Duchess, the elegant, soft-spoken mother, and her three mischievous kittens and abandons them in the French countryside. Soon, they re being escorted home by the charming Thomas O Malley, a rough-and-tumble alley cat, who takes them to his pad along the way, where Scat Cat and his band of swingin jazz cats perform the memorable Ev rybody Wants To Be A Cat. Enriched by highstyle Disney animation (The New Yorker) and toe-tapping music by Academy Award® winning songwriters the Sherman brothers, The Aristocats is a timeless treasure and the last animated feature to get the nod from Walt Disney himself.
Customer Review: Aristocats
We had the old VHS version and had been waiting for Disney to release a DVD version. Somehow we missed it so we were super glad that Amazon had a brand new copy for sale. This has been a family favorite for years and we really missed owning a copy. We're very happy with our purchase.
Customer Review: BEST IMAGE SHORT OF TRUE HI-DEF!
Nostalgic artists' views of pre-WWI Paris and the French countryside are the backdrop for this sweet Disney classic. The colors and crispness of image on this DVD are truly amazing. I would love to see this movie on Blu-Ray. It is hard to imagine this film looked much better in the theater. The story is the tried and true Disney formula of separation and struggle to be reunited. Innocent enough for the youngest kids, this movie has plenty to offer their parents. It is a shame there aren't six stars for a film like this. The DVD also lets you isolate the songs and skip everything else. It's like buying a separate soundtrack disc but with full animation. I'd like to see this feature on ALL musical movie DVD's.
Cake Decorating Course 1: Discover Cake Decorating
Cake Decorating Course 1: Discover Cake Decorating
Student guide for Wilton's cake decorating course 1: Discover Cake Decorating. .
48 pages, softcover.
Intended for participants in Wilton's cake decorating course 1 classes, but may also be used as a self-study guide.
Customer Review: A must have for the novice
If you have never decorated then this is a must have book. It shows you how to make frosting, fill pastry bags, and talks about the decorating tips you will need. It is very easy to understand for someone who have never decorated a cake. This is the perfect book to get your decorating hands going.
Customer Review: take the course with it, prepare to shell out more $$ for tools
I just begin a Wilton cake decorating class #1 at Michael's, and this book comes FREE with the class which is $18 (instructor says these course books should retail about $3-5 at most).
You should take the class in addition to read this book, the experience of live teaching by an experienced instructor is invaluable. During this class, you will learn the beginner cake decoration techniques. It's a lot of fun, and if you don't want to proceed onto course II or III, it should be fine with just decorating your average cupcake, cookies and basic cakes. [[though most people love it so much that they do advance on..]]
however, I do have to caution that the course I tool kit you can buy ($19.99 @ Michael's) is only the bare minimum, it does not have all the things you will need for the first class. so be prepared to develop this hobby and pay more (~$20-40 depending on what you want) for other tool/tips/bags....
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Eckhart Tolle is emerging as one of today's most inspiring teachers. In The Power of Now, already a word-of-mouth bestseller in Canada, the author describes his transition from despair to self-realization soon after his 29th birthday. Tolle took another ten years to understand this transformation, during which time he evolved a philosophy that has parallels in Buddhism, relaxation techniques, and meditation theory but is also eminently practical. In The Power of Now he shows readers how to recognize themselves as the creators of their own pain, and how to have a pain-free existence by living fully in the present. Accessing the deepest self, the true self, can be learned, he says, by freeing ourselves from the conflicting, unreasonable demands of the mind and living present, fully, and intensely, in the Now.
Customer Review: Powerful Clarity and Pragmatic Wisdom
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual classic, bestseller and translated into over 30 languages. It was awarded a member of Oprah's Book Club. Eckhart's newer book, A New Earth, is presently the newest addition to the Oprah Book Club. Oprah and Eckhart are currently offering a ten week online class that is accessible for free registration at Oprah's website. The first class was enjoyed by 700,000 people worldwide, from 139 countries and represented by all fifty states in the U.S.
Eckhart was born in Germany and graduated from the University of London. He became a research scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University. At 29 years old, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation that dissolved his identity as he had previously known it. This began an intense inward journey that radically changed the course of his life. He now teaches worldwide and lives in Vancouver, BC.
He is not aligned with any particular religion and yet his message does not exclude any doctrine or dogma. He is communicating that there is a simple and pragmatic way out of suffering into enduring peace.
Power of Now is a guide to breaking free of the ego, the mind-made self, with all of its problems and conflicts. Eckhart finely dissects the ego's characteristics so that we become more conscious of how it operates. Who we are is beyond thought, emotion and form. Yet our body is the portal through which we enter a new reality to realize harmony, peace and joy. He encourages us to become more aware of the silence and space all around us and then points to inner space and stillness. Through becoming more conscious, we find that we can be free of psychological pain and open to our authentic power.
Power of Now is divided into 10 chapters with 191 pages. The Preface is written by Marc Allen, New World Library and the Foreword is by Russell Dicarlo, author of Towards a New World View.
In the Introduction, Eckhart shares the origin of the book and that the truth of who we really are lies within us. Chapter One is a study of the mind; the greatest obstacle to enlightenment. Through still attention, we can discover that we are not what we are thinking. He defines enlightenment as rising above thought and that emotion is the body's reaction to our thinking.
Chapter Two begins leading us out of psychological pain by pointing to consciousness. He offers keys to unlock accumulated pain of the past and introduces us to the collective pain body that is suffering and constantly trying to feed on more pain. Since the mind-made self believes that its identity lies within its individuality, it is on constant search to complete itself through people, things and circumstances. He shares that ego's entire search for happiness is really a search for wholeness.
In Chapter Three, we move deeply into the Now, the dimension that is free of time and demonstrates that nothing truly exists outside this present moment. He offers the key to the spiritual dimension and how to access the Power of Now. All suffering has its root in psychological time. Eckhart masterfully guides us in a clear and pragmatic manner into the joy of being.
Chapter Four offers the mind strategies for avoiding the now and that it is delusion to think that we can ever be apart from it. He discusses the manner in which we dissolve unhappiness and ordinary unconsciousness to discover the inner purpose of our life's journey. In Chapter Five, he leads us to the state of presence and to realize pure consciousness; our divine Reality.
Chapter Six is a journey into the inner body, where we find an invisible and indestructible reality that is beyond our thinking. He shares how we can also physiological benefit by being present; such as slowing the aging process and strenthening the immume system.
In Chapter Seven, Eckhart offers portals through which we may discover the inner unmanifest that is deep within our bodies such as dreamless sleep, silence, and space.
Eckhart Tolle shifts to Enlightened Relationships in Chapter Eight and we begin to arise about relationships that cycle between relative love and hate. Our relationships and indeed our intimate partners are excellent teachers and a perfect spiritual practice to learn how to live in a deeper state of presence. He encourages you to give up the relationship with yourself, the false sense of self that is the ego.
In Chapter Nine, we discover that beyond the duality and cycling between happiness and unhappiness, there is peace. We notice the impermanence of the cycling, end the emotional drama, discover true compassion and move toward a new order of Reality.
The final Chapter Ten presents the meaning of surrender so that we are able to live in acceptance of this moment just as it is. We shift from mind energy to spiritual energy, while we transform suffering into peace.
Over twenty years ago, I awakened spontaneously and had no idea what had occurred. Many years later, I was fortunate to become friends with Eckhart before the publishing of The Power of Now. In fact, Eckhart encouraged the writing of my new book, Awake Joy. I would just like to underline the fact that you have the opportunity for a radical transformation in your life and that this awakening is the answer to enduring peace. It is the end of suffering for you, your family and the world.
Customer Review: However, for a five star inspirational and remarkably candid recounting
I recommend That's How the Light Gets In: Memoir of a Psychiatrist by Susan Rako, M.D. The title comes from a song by Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Rako faced the "now" in her life with courage and integrity. Her book is wonderfully well-written and a great read. The writing just flows.
The Halo Graphic Novel
The Halo Graphic Novel
Marvel and Bungie team up to create The Halo Graphic Novel HC based on the best-selling video game. The graphic novel brings the Halo universe to life for the first time in the sequential art medium in a 128-page, full color, high quality, jacketed, hardcover graphic novel. Stories include: "Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor" by Simon Bisley and Lee Hammock. When communications from a Covenant agricultural support ship are mysteriously terminated, an Elite Commander and his squad of Special Forces are sent to investigate. In "Armor Testing" by Ed Lee and Jay Faerber, the only way to test Spartan armor, is to send a Spartan. The question is what's really being tested? In Tsutomo Nihei's "Breaking Quarantine," the untold tale of Sergeant Johnson's escape from the clutches of the Flood menace is revealed! Finally, Moebius and Brett Lewis' "Second Sunrise Over New Mombasa" tells of the subtler, more dangerous fights taking place on the streets of New Mombasa and in the hearts and minds of men. Cover by Phil Hale. Gallery art created a number of elite artists including Rick Berry, Geof Darrow, Scott Fischer, Sterling Hundley, Craig Mullins, George Pratt, Juan Ramirez, George Staples, Justin Sweet, John Van Fleet and Kent Williams.
Customer Review: Halo idelism in cognitive junctures of corbalitive conclusions
From an outsider's standpoint looking in, they say one should never judge a book by it's cover but I will do as such nonpussed because the dynamics of the combative format is such that of such exclusite artful review that need I say more??
Customer Review: Disappointing
As a hardcore Halo fan, this is just downright disappointing. None of the stories follow Master Cheif, or Captain Keyes, or anyone remotely recognizable from the Halo universe except Sergeant Avery Johnson. The story with Sergeant Johnson is the only one worth viewing. This is an ok gift idea for someone you know who enjoys all things Halo, but if you really wanna get them something of value, go with one of the real novels instead.
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?
Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.
Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.
Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.
Customer Review: Enough is Enough!!!!
I'M AM SICK & TIRED OF THE RIGHT VILLIFING EVERY LIBERAL! WE WERE'NT THE ONE'S THAT LEAKED A CIA AGENTS NAME, WE WERE'NT THE ONES THAT LIED GETING INTO THE WAR, & GETTING OUR TROOPS KILLED, WE WERE'NT THE ONE THAT TURNED OUR BACK ON KATRINA VICTUMS & VETS AT WALTER REED, & WE WERE'NT THE ONES THAT BULLIED 911 WIDOWS. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Customer Review: American Fascism: Progressives, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Useful Historical Idiots
"History is written by the winners." So goes the discipline-denigrating cliché. A more accurate observation, as Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism, suggests, is that history is written by historians--and especially, in recent decades, by academics whose biases predispose them to serve as useful idiots for Joseph Stalin's defunct propaganda ministry. Though Goldberg's well-researched book doesn't focus minute attention on the culpability of leftist historians, it does provide convenient targets (Richard Hofstadter and William Shirer) who might be blamed for abetting the greatest intellectual ruse of the twentieth century--the absurd designation of fascism as an ideology of the political right.
Anyone looking for Coulteresque theater in Goldberg's work (the product of four years' labor) will be disappointed. The book isn't meant to toss "f-bombs" at liberals the way liberals regularly toss that seven-letter epithet at conservatives. Indeed, Goldberg reiterates again and again that he doesn't employ the word "fascism" as a synonym for Nazism, racism, or "evil." Rather, he uses the term to label a method of governing that expressed itself differently in different countries. Given that caveat, anyone who chooses to read this engrossing analysis of the origins of fascism will likely be rewarded with a paradigm-shifting experience that puts the history of the twentieth century in a new light--a history that places Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt in the same political neighborhood as Benito Mussolini.
The story of fascism, Goldberg notes, begins with the "holistic" philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau and his revolutionary progeny--men whose boundless conception of national communion (via a general will) led to the odd idea that dissidents would be "forced to be free"--a fate more benign than the guillotine that "freed" enemies of the state from error during the French Reign of Terror. Hegel's philosophy, where the state incarnates God's work in history, provides another piece of the ancestral puzzle, while Nietzsche's romantic and relativistic "will to power" adds a third leg to fascism's Continental heritage. A fourth progenitor was Otto von Bismarck, whose comprehensive welfare package for the new German Empire provided Western intellectuals with a top-down model of social policy that they yearned to replicate.
These historical connections aren't exceptionally novel, but the American branches of fascism's genealogical tree are unexpected--limbs that include the pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey as well as political writers like Henry George (Progress and Poverty), Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), and Herbert Croly (The Promise of American Life). Drawing on these and other sources, Goldberg not only shows that European fascism is a product of the political left, he also argues persuasively that America's version of that system is rooted in the Progressive movement and was first given national expression in the war socialism of Woodrow Wilson.
Not surprisingly, Goldberg's first two chapters are devoted to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. But contrary to the impression given by pop-history, Mussolini isn't relegated to the status of an absurd fifth wheel. Instead, Il Duce's role as the "Father of Fascism" is clearly laid out. The portrait of his rise to power in 1922--more than a decade before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany--is the story of an intellectual whose communist sympathies were developed from infancy. (Even his given names, Benito Amilcare Andrea, conjured up leftist heroes from the past.) Those socialist sentiments remained with Mussolini to the day of his death--alongside his obsession with sexual conquest and his contempt for Christianity.
As Goldberg notes, Mussolini's state-centered, anti-capitalist rhetoric could only be declared "right-wing" by ideologues who were fighting over the same political bone. In other words, it was the internecine struggle between fascists and communists that gave birth to the longstanding practice of separating the terms "fascist" and "socialist." This linguistic divorce was mandated by Stalin to stigmatize the socialist heresy Mussolini promoted in light of his comrades' nationalistic response to World War I.
Goldberg also emphasizes that fascism itself varied from nation to nation. Most significantly, the Jew-hatred that characterized Hitler's regime wasn't integral to Italian Fascism--a movement that included a disproportionate number of Jews. Indeed, Mussolini scoffed at the Aryan myth that animated German Nazism, preferring for his part to play the role of a latter-day Caesar who was destined to resurrect Rome's ancient greatness.
The most unexpected part of Goldberg's Mussolini portrait is the way the Italian leader was hailed in American Progressive circles (e.g. in issues of Herbert Croly's New Republic) and in American pop-culture. Even as late as 1934, Cole Porter's song, "You're the Top," exhibited this adulatory attitude toward the Italian idol. Only after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935 did this admiration begin to wane. Significantly, the American President that Mussolini praised effusively in 1919, three years before his march on Rome, was Woodrow Wilson.
As far as Hitler's left-wing credentials are concerned, Goldberg's discussion of the Nazi Party Platform does a good job of demonstrating that the word "socialist" in National Socialist wasn't mere window dressing. After summarizing that ambitious document, Goldberg offers this sarcastic conclusion:
"Ah, yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!"
Analysis of the groups from which Nazism drew its support also shows that corporations weren't (as Moscow insisted) pulling strings behind the scene. Rather, Nazism emerged as a populist movement that was so cash-strapped Hitler frequently rode to rallies "in the back of an old pickup." As the historian Henry Ashby Turner concludes, corporate funding of the Nazi party was "at best" of "marginal significance." Were it not for decades of leftist disinformation, that conclusion would have been a foregone conclusion, given the virulently anti-capitalist language of Mein Kampf--language Hitler still employed in 1941. In short, Goldberg provides extensive evidence that Hitler's political program was just as "right-wing" as the politics of Leon Trotsky--whom Stalin also labeled a "fascist."
It is one thing to assert that fascism is a product of the political left--one of the "heresies of socialism" according to Harvard Professor Richard Pipes. It is something else to argue that fascism has its own American expression that grew out of the Progressive political tradition and that "Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century's first fascist dictator." That, however, is precisely the proposition put forward in Goldberg's third chapter: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism.
To bolster this hypothesis, Goldberg highlights connections between the intellectual milieu that fostered fascism in Europe and the milieu that begat American Progressivism. Henry George's Progress and Poverty, for example, was received enthusiastically in Europe where it helped to shape populist and socialist economic theory. Similarly, Edward Bellamy's utopian vision in Looking Backward (where a single municipal umbrella would one day shield all Bostonians from the rain) drew inspiration from Bismarck's top-down political example in Germany. These and other "holistic" visions of society fed into an American Progressive movement whose moral energy was derived largely from legions of Social Gospelers. As Goldberg notes, the party's 1912 presidential convention was described in the New York Times as a "convention of fanatics" and "religious enthusiasts." This fusion of social reform and religious fervor is central to what Goldberg calls "liberal fascism."
On the philosophical side of the ledger, American Progressivism looked to William James, John Dewey, and Charles Darwin. The former duo provided a relativistic and pragmatic outlook that coincided nicely with bold social experimentation. Dewey, in particular, advocated an "organic" Darwinian approach to society that consigned American individualism to the dustbin of evolutionary history. Darwinism also brought to the Progressive project a focus on racist genetics that (alongside the movement's militant imperialism) subsequent historians have been eager to forget. Furthermore, the polite moral relativism of James and Dewey echoed the unequivocal relativism expressed by Nietzsche (whose philosophy, according to H. L. Mencken, Theodore Roosevelt had swallowed whole). Finally, the attachment of elite progressives to Hegel's political philosophy (Goldberg notes that Woodrow Wilson "even invoked Hegel in a love letter to his wife.") reinforced the idea that society is an organic whole and that reformers are, quite literally, God's instruments on earth.
Woodrow Wilson is the unexpected villain of Liberal Fascism. Based on a review of his academic writings, Goldberg demonstrates that Wilson was a devotee of power--power utilized according to the pragmatic lights of John Dewey. Consequently, the twenty-eighth president denigrated, with the confidence of a divinely anointed leader, those constitutional provisions that limited his ability to mold the nation into a healthy organism that worked for the good of all. This "evolutionary" vision of history provided the intellectual justification for that modern legal theory that dissolves all governmental boundaries--the living Constitution. It also paved the way for an approach to education that transferred the locus of pedagogical authority from parents to the state. In Professor Wilson's words: "Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life...[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can."
World War I gave President Wilson the crisis he needed to implement the top-down vision of social coordination he had written about for decades. Government instruments employed in this massive effort (whose only near precedent was Lincoln's response to the Civil War) included the War Industries Board, a vigorous and widespread propaganda ministry, and a justice department that, Goldberg notes, presided over the arrest and jailing of more dissidents than Mussolini incarcerated during the entire 1920s. From censorship, to price-fixing, to Palmer raids, to patriotic nursery rhymes designed for toddlers, mobilization gave Wilson's government unprecedented access to and control over people's lives. This whipping of individualistic Americans into collective shape was cheered by progressives like Walter Lippmann who saw in the war an opportunity to bring about a Nietzschean "transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect." No wonder Warren Harding won the presidency in 1920 with a campaign that promised a return to "normalcy."
With the advent of the Great Depression, Progressives were given an opportunity to reprise the coordination achieved under Wilson's war socialism. The British journalist Alistair Cooke doubtless turned many heads when, in the 1970s, he announced on his popular PBS history series that America under FDR "flirted with National Socialism." Goldberg argues that the amorous relationship was a good deal more intimate--a relationship fanned by the populist hot air that emanated from Father Coughlin and Senator Huey Long and consummated by many of the individuals that ran Wilson's war agencies. A prime example of these fascist retreads was Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, whose "sock in the nose" style at the National Recovery Administration doubtless drew positive reviews from one of FDR's early admirers, Benito Mussolini. Even Germany's new Fuhrer had words of praise for the government-business partnerships that typified Roosevelt's New Deal.
The expansion of government under Franklin Roosevelt is well known. What isn't acknowledged in polite historical circles, as Goldberg notes, is how "the fascist flavor of the New Deal was not only regularly discussed" but even "cited in Roosevelt's favor." Why this inconvenient fact was dropped down the historical memory hole is clear. Leftist historians had no desire to link the paragon of modern "liberalism" with "right-wing" fascism. Stated more honestly, they didn't want to acknowledge that fascism was a left- wing philosophy and expose the ongoing historical ruse that kept conservatives (i.e. classical liberals) off balance.
The remainder of Goldberg's book (more than half) discusses progressivism's third wave of influence on American life in the 1960s and explains how its fascist traits have been incorporated into modern "liberalism." While not as narrowly focused as his first four chapters, these materials do give further definition to the concept of "liberal fascism"--a phrase coined in 1932 by H. G. Wells to promote an ambitious "liberal" variant of Europe's burgeoning political system.
Among the concepts that Goldberg identifies as integral to sixties radicalism are these: the romantic embrace of youthful impulsiveness and sexuality, the denigration of reason and tradition, the extension of politics into all areas of life, the exaltation of identity politics (initially in terms of race and gender), and the justification of violence committed by revolutionaries intent on creating a mythical heaven on earth (e.g. the Black Panthers). All these themes, Goldberg notes, have significant corollaries in the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany.
What separates these 60s street radicals from Great Society and contemporary progressives, however, is the smothering maternalism that characterizes the latter groups. Today's "liberal fascists," unlike their European and turn-of-the-century American forebears, promote a religion of the state that is non-militaristic. As such, it resembles Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, not George Orwell's 1984. No better example of this smothering maternalism exists than Hillary Clinton's magnum opus, It Takes A Village--a mythical world where helpful government programs cover the social landscape and where repetitive video messages inculcate useful parenting tips "any place where people gather and have to wait."
Another Goldberg chapter, Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine, shows how "eugenics lay at the heart of the progressive enterprise"--an assertion backed by historian Edwin Black, who noted that the eugenic crusade was "created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune." This embarrassing skeleton in the Progressive closet is compared with the implicit pro-abortion subtext in the best-selling book, Freakonomics--namely, "fewer blacks, less crime."
Regrettably, Goldberg's final chapter, The New Age: We're All Fascists Now, begins to treat fascist traits so eclectically that the precision and focus of earlier chapters is lost. Looking for fascist themes in Dirty Harry and Whole Foods Market is a bit like searching for grandmother's features in little Ricky's newborn mug. One is bound to find something, but isolated traits don't amount to a close likeness. A similar critique applies to Goldberg's afterword, The Tempting of Conservatism, where playing (perhaps badly) at the only governmental game in town seems to be confused with religious devotion to the political Weltanschauung exhibited in It Takes A Village.
Despite these end-of-book drawbacks, Goldberg has produced a popular book of rare historical depth and quality--a book that promises to scrap those ridiculous history-class charts that put democracy midway between "socialism" on the left and "fascism" on the right, then justify their totalitarian extremes by bending the linear ends into a globe where left and right magically "meet."
An old Soviet joke asserted that loyal comrades know the future; it's only the past that keeps changing. With Goldberg's assistance, Americans can begin to rewrite their own political history, this time putting the "fascist" label where it belongs. That single alteration would be a momentous accomplishment--one that would make the architects of democracy's future more sure-handed.
Review by Richard Kirk
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer and a regular columnist for San Diego's North County Times. His book reviews have appeared in American Spectator Online, Touchstone, The American Enterprise, and First Things. See his blog, Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer.
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