The Far Left and Fascism
The argumentum ad Hitlerum has always been the first refuge of the moral and political ignoramus: "You don't approve of [welfare, sodomy, dope-smoking, Federal student loans, or whatever else a right to which the speaker considers the most precious]? You're a f***ing Nazi!" It rarely gets more sophisticated than that.
The international Communist movement, however, which included a great many pseudo-intellectuals of Soros-like talents, had in its day slightly more subtle, if equally disreputable, grounds for making use of the ploy. Given that the Soviet Union had been, during World War II, one of the enemies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Communists could pass themselves off as paradigmatic anti-fascists; and from there it was, for them, but a short step to concluding that any enemy of such paradigmatic anti-fascists must himself be a paradigmatic fascist. Of course, these inferences are utterly fallacious; but one needs, perhaps, the average Communist's three brain cells to make them, rather than the two brain cells that suffice for the campus stoner to infer that anyone who wants to take his bong from him simply must have a well-thumbed copy of Mein Kampf hidden under the mattress.
The tendency of Nation-magazine style Leftists reliably to lapse into the fascist/right-winger comparison is in part a holdover from this hoary Communist tactic, a nervous tic that an old fellow-traveler can find it hard to lose even fifteen years after the collapse of the Evil Empire. What the comparison conveniently forgets is the alliance that existed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union before Hitler decided to betray Stalin, the Leftist dictator whose example had taught him so much about concentration camps and secret police. It forgets too the actual history of the development of fascist and National Socialist ideology, which had everything to do with developments in the socialist tradition in political thought, and absolutely nothing to do with the intellectual currents that gave rise to contemporary conservatism. But then, from Lenin and Stalin onward, the Left has been very good at airbrushing over any evidence of its true history, intellectual and otherwise.....
The Mustache on the Left - TCS Daily
