Adolf Hitler: Proto Crunchy Con?

Having read the book I don't think Goldberg necessarily thinks organic produce is a bad thing, but it was part of a collectivist Nazi society. And with some people on The Left, it's hard to argue that it's one more brick in the wall of conformity.

Whaaa??

The proliferation of agri-business, monoculture, GMO's, clones, hybrids and such is the where the conformity lies.

I do think it's a bit unfair to ridicule Goldberg for such a heavily edited video clip. It's easy to make anybody look like an idiot with that kind of cut-and-paste job.

I cannot wait to see the complete, unedited interview. I'm sure Goldberg will appear every bit the idiot and more. I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone's coming to Goldberg's defense. Here he is, on COMEDY CENTRAL, for Pete's sake, trying to sell his book with a smiley face and a Hitler mustache on the cover.

And he expects what, a sober, dispassionate exchange on modern liberalism? The mind boggles.

Will the last person left at National Review please turn off the lights and the latte machine?

Far-right totalitarianism, aka, fascism, is, in essence, a descendant of the absolute power held by royalty. It is an attempt to regulate power in society, it almost always involves the worship of said power to use against 'enemies'.

Their leaders are powerful and that fact makes them right and good, and their enemies are unequivocally evil. It is why the Nazi party was hugely into symbols, and why Big Brother showed up on your TV and the minute of hate.

The 'villains' fascism fights are always large, discrete groups of people, sometimes internal, sometimes external. There's a lot of talk of destiny, and a lot of wars getting started.

Far-left totalitarianism, aka, communism, OTOH, is populism taken to the ultimate extreme, and then inevitably hijacked. It does not rely on symbols and leader worship, it actually requires the exact opposite, the fiction that everyone is treated equally. There's a lot of double-speak and changing the meanings of words, and even editing history, although that last happens in fascism too.

They do not usually fight wars of invasion, they instead prefer to overthrow governments through 'freedom fighters' and install leaders that are 'the will of the people'. Raw military power to gain territory is not usual. (To keep it, OTOH, is.)

The 'villains' it fights are dissidents and intellectuals who do not agree with the movement, internal non-conformists, and it's really only fighting them because they are a threat. (This last is hard to see if you only look at the USSR, because of Stalin and his purges. But Stalin wasn't manufacturing enemies because he needed them, he was manufacturing them because he was a paranoid lunatic. Hitler, OTOH, needed them.)

There have been about a dozen of each sort of government, and almost every single one follows one set of the traits, although it's not always the set their name would imply. (Nazis being the big one.)

It's worth pointing out North Korea is the exception, as it managed to evolve from far-left to far-right, as far as I can tell. North Korea: All the economic disadvantages of communism combined with inane military spending fascism brings.

It's also worth pointing out there are other sorts of totalitarian governments. While fascism can present itself as a military dictatorship, all military dictatorships are not fascism, or even communist, sometimes they just are. And theocratic totalitarian societies can be totally random.

This book is seriously stupid. If someone wants to argue that liberalism is halfway to communism, whatever. But I urge people to read the differences above, and realize there is a fairly large difference between communism and fascism in how they operate. It's not just, as Goldberg seems to think, some sort of clever word game.