OFFLIST: Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Law Student With a History of Taking Left Turns

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Jul 24 11:58:40 PDT 2003


Brad DeLong wrote:


>>First time I saw "Triumph of the Will" was with my colleagues in
>>Yale's Party of the Right. They loved it!
>>
>>Doug
>
>Do tell...

<http://eserver.org/bs/36/henwood.html>

[...]

On one of my first evenings with my POR comrades, I watched as they paged through the freshman face book, The Old Campus, commenting on the anatomy of the women. Not their anatomy in the Heffnerian sense, but in the Nazi biologist's sense: what the shape of their skulls, particularly the brow line, told about their intelligence and character.

With any right-wing movement, the Nazi Question is never far from the surface. Publicly, most of U.S. conservatism, given its market-libertarian bent, is anti-Nazi, because fascism is that worst of all things, statist. It's also suspiciously European; though the POR, like most U.S. right-wing formations, was full of Anglophiles, the Continent is thought to be deeply "unsound" (a favorite POR word, as was "sound"). Privately, though, many right-wingers (non-Jewish right-wingers, of course) are titillated by Nazis. Nazi jokes and mock self-identification as a Nazi were part of the POR discourse. One evening a delegation of us went to the language lab to watch a German Department-sponsored screening of Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. There were about three German students there and ten right-wingers.

[...]



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