See below
-----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood [mailto:dhenwood at panix.com] Sent: Mon 6/30/2003 6:37 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Cc: Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Neocons Inspired By Italian Fascists?
= = = Doug sez: The article said that Ledeen admires the model of Italian fascism, a rather interesting point. The guy has some influence in the admin and on the right. Why isn't this relevant and worrisome? = = =
Hi,
Not relevant because you are being taken for a ride that started with Telos and their flirtation with deBenoist years ago.
First, the basic argument in the article is fallacious, as I said before, and anyone who cares to diagram it on paper will see that it fails the logic sniff test.
The clue is in the subtitle:
"Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right"
So the argument is that neoconservatism is more like fascism that the "American Right."
Let's set the stage. By the "American Right," the author Laughland really means Buchanan's brand of right-wing populist paleoconservatism. This sector is a melange of xenophobia, ethnoracialist nationalism, and what is called business nationalism (pro-tariff, anti-globalism, industrial sector of capitalism).
Paleoconservatives hate neoconservatives.
Neoconservatives embrace international capitalism, globalism, and U.S. imperialism.
Paleoconservatives think that fascism is a form of revolutionary left socialist statism in nationalist drag. They argue that fascism and communism are two sides of the same revolutionary collectivist statist coin.
Buchanan and the paleoconservatives -- radical traditionalists -- are actually closer to neofascism.
Anyone who has read either Marty Lee's The Beast Reawakens (as MP has already pointed out) or Right-Wing Populism in America by Lyons and me can explain what is going on here.
The paleoconservatives want to broaden their anti-globalist coalition. Their frame: Patriotic anti-globalists fight the fascism of Bush and Ledeen in a heroic coalition to smash the corrupt regime. Strasserism redux. Fascism as a mass movement claims to be anticapitalist.
All of the quotes from Ledeen about fascism are cast in the form of implying that he likes fascism. This is an outllandish distortion. Almost every quote by Ledeen represents a theoretical position taken by a broad range of anti-fascist scholars in the past thirty years: left, center, and even right. The creative energy, the mass base, the populist rhetoric, the call for a heroic empire, the rebirth of civilization. I make all these points in my writing and I am an antifascist.
After counting on the fact of the ignorance of the average reader as to Ledeen's actual writing which is antifascist, and the last 30 years of scholarship that makes Ledeen's quotes actually banal, the final fallacy of logic is so transparent as to be pathetic:
"As Ledeen shows, the Italian fascists expressed their desire “to tear down the old order” (his words from 2002) in terms that are curiously anticipatory of a famous statement in 2003 by the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld."
Buchanan, Laughman, and The American Conservative want to restore the traditional (White, male, Christian, heterosexual, anti-union, anti-immigrant) Old Order. So they are trying to con you into thinking that Bush and Ledeen represent a form of fascism.
Bush and Ledeen represent a rapcious form of multinational capitalist imperialism ruled by the U.S.
Buchanan, Laughman, and The American Conservative represent a form of protofascist nationalism.
The point is to oppose both.
-Chip Berlet
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