Beck: We are really, truly, stepping beyond socialism and we're starting to look at fascism. We are putting business and government together!
Ingraham: Glenn, you're throwing a lot of terms around, and I'm going to play devil's advocate, because this is fair and balanced. Now, moving from socialism to communism, that's, that's a pretty big leap -- socialism, obviously, the economic system, communism the political system. How are we right now moving toward state ownership of all, for instance, heavy industry?
Beck: Let me first of all just explain first what happened in Nazi Germany. It was National -- Socialism. We're talking now about nationalizing the banks, and socialized programs. National. Socialism.
At first in Nazi Germany, everybody was so panicked, they were so freaked. Remember -- don't take anytime to think about it, we've just got to do, do, do. At first all the big companies and the big capitalists in Germany said, 'Oh thank goodness there's a savior! OK, great! We'll do that, yes!' It didn't take too long before -- like here in America, now Goldman Sachs. They've started to see the writing on the wall and went, 'Whoa, whoa whoa! You guys are getting out of control here. What are you guys doing?' And they couldn't get out of it fast enough.
Unfortunately, for those in Germany, you could never go back. I don't know if this is the system that we're headed towards or not, where they're not going to let you out, but let me tell you something, I don't want to play this game. This is becoming extraordinarily dangerous.
What a doughy pantload.
Can you tell whether they're talking about fascism, socialism, or communism? Or are these all just basically one big mushy concept to Beck? This kind of incoherence-unto-meaninglessness is indeed the hallmark of Goldberg's work on these subjects.
As with Goldberg, it renders all these terms into so much Newspeak.
Beyond just the obvious, comical incoherence of this, Beck is babbling ahistorical nonsense seemingly fabricated from whole cloth. I have no idea where in the world Beck is obtaining his information -- John Wayne WWII movies, perhaps?
Sgt. Fury comics? -- but as political history, this is just a smattering of facts mangled into pure gobbledygook.
First, the National Socialists, aka Nazis, were "Socialists" in roughly the same way that the "Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics" was run by
Republicans. It was a marketing term that reflected more the fascists' real roots in the radical ferment around socialism, but there is little question (
beyond Goldberg's fanboy cult) that fascism generically and Nazism specifically were
right-wing phenomena.
The citations available on this subject
are numerous, but probably the clearest explanation comes from [ame="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400040949/crooksandliar-20/ref=nosim/"]
Robert O. Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism[/ame], who explains that fascism for all its rhetoric was in practice closely aligned with and allied with capitalists and conservatives -- some of whom, years down the road, came to regret the association, but the vast majority of whom approved enthusiastically up through the war years. (Think [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp"]
Krupp[/ame].)
They were also decidedly -- violently, murderously -- anti-socialist.
Beck-Ingraham duet on Fox: Incoherent ideological babble has the ring of Newspeak | Crooks and Liars