Ledeen's book, "The War on the Terror Masters, " or whatevah it was, with REALLY BIG PRINT (wish I could do one of those freeper HUGE typeface thingeroos here!) that I skimmed a bit of, is a piece o' trash.
Still, and not wanting to defend the guy in the least (!), he was a grad student of George Mosse, and has a preface to a reissue of a Raymond Aron classic from Transaction Books, one of the luminaries of fascism studies (see the Paul Buhle edited anthology on, "Studies on the Left, " and the Madison New Left for a warm piece on Mosse, and his newish autobio. Need to read his book on fascist hyper-masculinism...while I put on this Pink Swastika...kidding, not that any of this is a laughing matter!!! (Los Angeles had an explicitly fascist gay S&M group in the 70's, btw. And look at all that boot-licking, Nazi imagery of Tom of Finland!)(Pink Swastika, allusion to a notoriorious pamphlet http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Barracks/8706/ by a neo-Nazi w/ the National Alliance and Christian Right lawyer, now in Sacramento, quoted in the SF Chronicle last week, day after the Supremes decision)
LaRouche, is always going on about Ledeen and the Universal Fascism book too. I suspect Ledeen argument isn't as pro-fascist, as LaRouche or this Laughland guy makes out. And, not that the large(!!!) problems w/ LaRouche and Laughland politics, discredit either, eo ipso, on Ledeen, well, I'd rather see someone take apart Ledeen with a left background unsullied by the fascism of LaRouche or the odious pro-Milosevic stance of Laughland, who in the New Statesman called Slobo a socialist. When he was Eaglebergers fave pro-western neo-lib banking bureaucrat, kleptocrat, oppurtunistic nationalist demogogue and accimplice to the murder of thousand, who did as much as the IMF that he collabororated w/ to destroy multi-ethnic, multi- culti Yugoslav socialism. Michael Pugliese P.S. Telos had all this about Ledeen and his book on Universal Fascism, in the 80's. Was mentioned in the context of a piece on Iran-Contra. Ledeen was the Reagan admin. liason with Israeli Labor Party (through Peres et. al. there was a connection w/ that affair, and with the extremely corrupt, Bettino (hey, that name!) Craxi, of the utterly "right-wing social democratic" Italian Socialist Party, whose only honorable figure was Norberto Bobbio, who has a great book on marxist theories of the state and was a anti-fascist partisan during WWII.