Like Justice Antonin Scalia, to whom the neocons owe this shitty administration and their revival as ideological menace, neocon shithead Michael "Great historians have concluded that Americans are a warlike people and they love war" Ledeen has a lifelong infatuation with fascism:
'In 1975, Ledeen published an interview, in book form, with the Italian historian Renzo de Felice, a man he greatly admires. It caused a great controversy in Italy. Ledeen later made clear that he relished the ire of the left-wing establishment precisely because “De Felice was challenging the conventional wisdom of Italian Marxist historiography, which had always insisted that fascism was a reactionary movement.” What de Felice showed, by contrast, was that Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary. Ledeen had himself argued this very point in his book, Universal Fascism, published in 1972. That work starts with the assertion that it is a mistake to explain the support of fascism by millions of Europeans “solely because they had been hypnotized by the rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skilful propagandists.” “It seems more plausible,” Ledeen argued, “to attempt to explain their enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people.” For Ledeen, as for the lifelong fascist theoretician and practitioner, Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal lay in the fact that fascism was “the Revolution of the 20th century.”'
The irony that this comes from Pat Buchanon's crypto-fascist American Conservative magazine is a nice one. After all, since when do paleocons really get up in arms over this sort of thing? Therefore, usually the paleocons are content to slag the neocons as "Trotskyist" as if that is the only epithet which can adhere to an internationalist movement. Actually, while there are strains of fascism, such as that of Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal that are "isolationist", most versions of fascism had a decidedly internationalist outlook, and at any rate most True Believer ideologies tend to forcible exportation and top-down "restructuring". In fact, this very tendency is by definition usually fascist.
A universal trait of fascism is the love of offensive (now euphemised by neocons as "preemptive") force and the hatred of any notion of self-determination. Even when it is, due to realpolitik considerations, "isolationist."
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 1:25 PM
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