Franciso Franco, Donald Trump and the Future of Fascism

The Socialist party in Spain is taking power and it appears that high on its agenda is to interrupt the eternal slumber of General Francisco Franco in his gothic mausoleum, Valle de los Caidos. With the shifting tectonic plates of Spanish politics his posthumous eviction appears to be on the near horizon, a savory morsel of venganza for the Spanish left over the Franquistas.

Forty-three years after his death and the restoration of the Spanish monarchy and almost eighty years since his civil war victory over the Spanish Republicans the hatred of the Spanish left for the dead Caudillo continues unabated. In the long run Franco abjectly failed in Spain to stem the modern, secularizing tides of change that were washing over the rest of Europe. Unforgettable and unforgiveable, however, is that he was on the wrong side of history, opposed by the “progressives” of his time, and thus, not supposed to win in 1939. That he did with the help of Hitler and Mussolini makes his memory an unrelenting abomination.

Whenever progressives lose they think and act as if they stand on the brink of an apocalypse, as was in stark evidence recently in the reaction of the American left to the improbable defeat of Hillary Clinton who sneered at Trump as a Fascist of sorts whose supporters were “irredeemable.” Trump, like Franco, was declared to be on the wrong side of history and not supposed to win. For the progeny of the communists, socialists and anarchists who succumbed to Franco’s Nationalists, his victory and subsequent dictatorship must be rendered a political and moral cataclysm fit only for execration.  Revenge is to be vented symbolically upon his tomb and his memory.    

A recent article in the New York Times on the planned demolition of Franco’s crypt quotes Paul Preston, who has written prolifically on Franco and the Spanish Civil War.

“Paul Preston, a British historian and biographer of Franco, said that Spain was an anomaly in Europe in keeping a ‘place of pilgrimage for its fascist dictator’ — there are no monuments to Adolf Hitler in Germany or in Austria, nor to Benito Mussolini in Italy. Among the more than 250,000 visitors to the Valle de los Caídos each year, Mr. Preston said, many are devotees of Franco ‘brought up to believe that he was a benefactor for Spain.’”

Preston does not bother to speculate as to what sort of considerations might move these misguided “devotees” of the Generalissimo. Certainly, they would be nothing that would make any sense to the normal, rational sorts of people who read the New York Times and reflect thoughtfully on all matters of politics. You see, Preston, while nominally a historian, is really a high functioning, sophisticated member of that school of moralists whose theorizing is firmly anchored to the ghost of Adolf Hitler, the ne plus ultra of wickedness and depravity who seems to be always busy reincarnating himself as Trump, Putin, Bush II or whoever is the current menace of right-thinking people said to be “strangling democracy” somewhere. For moralizing purposes, this “Hitlerizing” approach works very well leaving no moral ambiguity to contend with; those who are good and those who are evil are clearly distinguishable. Those who are evil are supremely and unequivocally so, which by contrast makes those who are good paragons of virtue and moral rectitude. When a brand new Hitler comes to town, no need for further conversation, debate or compromise; taking to the streets, brandishing anti-Fascist bona fides, and active resistance is the only moral option. Franco, for Preston, was just an Iberian cutout of the Austrian Corporal, and so anyone who might even attempt to offer an attenuating perspective on his life and career, would have to be castigated as a Brownshirt apologist, drooling away on the fringes. (See: Fosterspeak: Santiago Carrillo, the Last Stalinist)

For historical understanding, however, Preston’s work will not be especially helpful. He remains invincibly oblivious to the reasons that explain why, unlike the absence of monuments for Hitler and Mussolini in contemporary Germany and Italy, there were and are monuments to Franco in Spain. Franco died of natural causes in his old age having prudently kept his country out of World War II (refusing Hitler’s entreaties to draw Spain into an alliance) and having prepared for a peaceful succession of power to a constitutional order. This was in stark contrast to the dramatic, violent exits of Hitler and Mussolini that capped the epic destruction and ruin that their reigns brought to large portions of the planet. The Germans after Hitler’s demise got the Nuremberg Trials; Spain upon Franco’s death got King Juan Carlos, a decent and benevolent man. Spain was never occupied by conquering foreign armies (no Spanish women by the tens of thousands raped and murdered by Red Army soldiers), its citizens never forced or bribed to behave in ways deemed “appropriate” by their Soviet, British, French and American occupiers. Finally, Spanish Catholics might well consider Franco a “benefactor” of sorts given the fate of religious people in communist governed lands throughout the twentieth century. Catholics fared better in mid-twentieth century Spain, then they did in, let us say, Poland.

The Socialists in Spain have been in the Franco decommissioning mode for some time. In 2007 they passed the Law of Historical Memory (Yes, that is not a parody) and commenced the renaming of streets and buildings and the removal of monuments and statues having anything to do with Franco. The Valle de los Caidos has, of course, always been their grand prize. Historical “memory” in contemporary western Europe is a state monopolized enterprise and incorrect thinking about touchy subjects is subject to punishment. To make certain Hitler reigns historically supreme and unchallenged as the Avatar of Evil, historians who depart from the officially sanctioned narratives about German iniquities and culpability are labeled as “holocaust deniers,” their morally opprobrious opinions deemed sufficient to subject them to criminal prosecution. When the state resorts to the criminalizing of unpopular opinions, however, one has to wonder what defects or limitations there might be with the orthodox version that require persecution of the sceptics. Since the dissenters are so obviously deluded and/or ignorant that no normal person would pay them attention, why do they need to be threatened with prison?

The American left has no Franco statues upon which to vent their anti-Fascist fury, but the 2016 Presidential surprise election of Donald Trump was immediately followed by his predictable Hitlerization. Statues and monuments signaling “white supremacy” are now the targets of our very own antifas and Black Lives Matters gangs who seem to resemble the church-burning, priest-murdering, nun-raping, anti-Fascist Spanish anarchists of the 1930s. The attempted mass-murder last year by Bernie Sanders supporter, James Hodgkinson, of dozens of Republican Congressmen and the encouragement by national Democrat leaders for their supporters to engage in the harassment and physical intimidation of Trump administration officials portends an escalation to unprecedented levels of violent political conflict.   

Just recently, the NAACP called for the sandblasting away of Confederate carvings on Stone Mountain Georgia.  The north face of Stone Mountain depicts three Confederate figures — Confederacy President Jefferson Davis and generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Work on the carving began in 1923, according to the park’s website. It is 400 feet above ground and the entire carved surface covers about three acres. It is larger than Mount Rushmore.  A protest march on July 4^th included Black Panthers armed with AK-47s and AR-15s.

From the Democrat Candidate for Governor of Georgia:

“Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams called for the removal of the giant carving that depicts three Confederate war leaders on the face of state-owned Stone Mountain, saying it “remains a blight on our state and should be removed.’”

The left in Spain and the U.S are set on destroying the symbols of a past that make them feel bad. In Spain the memory of Franco seems to poison their waking moments even though he has been long dead and widely forgotten in most of the world. In the U.S. the memory of slavery and Jim Crow, though ancient history, continues to arouses their resentment.

Purging Franco from public spaces and tearing down Confederate statues, however, is not going to make the moralists on the left feel better because feeling bad (angry, resentful, vengeful) is the high octane emotional fuel that runs the engines of cultural Marxism. Left-wing ideologues and activists gain political traction by leveraging the grievances of victim classes, by churning up their anger and turning it against the oppressor classes. Victims who don’t realize that they are victims and feel bad about it are of no use, and without self-conscious, agitated victims, cultural Marxism is like a fast car with no wheels; it goes nowhere.

What helps to keep the bad feelings fresh, invigorating and thus efficacious for members of the victim class is a demonizing vocabulary at their disposal that enables them to portray the oppressors as malignant cretins who have no place in a modern, progressive society. Which is why “Fascist” remains one of the favorites in the left’s lexicon of abuse and why Hitler keeps reappearing whenever progressives experience some resistance to their planned march to perfect equality. The logic is obvious and primitive. “Hitler would be against ‘x’ (‘x’ being the latest progressive fashion); therefore, your opposition to ‘x’ means you must be like Hitler.”  “Fascism” has the ideal, goose-stepping imagery and historical connotations from the 1930s that make it the perfect, all-purpose smear – the Gestapo, concentration camps, racial persecution, cult-worship of the leader. 

Real flesh and blood Fascists were extinguished by WWII Allied armies, and those few today who imitate the originals occupy the only the far reaches of the social fringe. Thus, the curious irony: while neo-Nazis and Klansmen are few and far between, and while no one in their right mind today wants to be connected with anything resembling Fascism, for the left, it seems, a sizeable portion of the U.S. is made up of them, including our President. The overreach should seem silly and obvious to all but the most deranged fringe of the left. But the smear will persist widely because the left needs Fascists to affirm their own virtue and rationalize their escalating assaults on free speech, religious freedom and historical symbols that offend them. Without the specters of Hitler, Franco, the Klan, sandblasting monuments and renaming streets might seem like a waste of time and effort.

Has the Spanish Civil War Ended?

“Spain on a knife's edge as Madrid seizes control of rebel Catalonia” (Madrid, AFP)   

Deja vu isn’t what it used to be. I am confused. Hasn’t the Spanish Civil War ended? Here is a clue from the first paragraph of the AFP news release under the headline above. “Spain was plunged into crisis Friday as Madrid seized power from independence-seeking Catalonia, the first curtailment of regional autonomy since the brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco.” Yes, let’s keep “the brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco” front and center when we talk about contemporary Spain. Here we have the mass media slipping some virtue signaling into the mix to guide the reader, historiographically speaking, through dark, turbulent waters toward the safe harbor of cultural Marxist hermeneutics as he contemplates the current disorder.

AFP, by the way, stands for Agence France-Presse, an international news agency headquartered in Paris and the third largest news agency in the world, after AP and Reuters. Those who gaze at the world under the journalistic tutelage of the cognoscenti from AP, AFP and Reuters, should be aware that “brutal dictatorship” is one of their well-worn meta-political prescriptions, a de rigueur qualifier for right-wing dictators, living or dead. Rarely or ever do they apply it to the “liberators” of the left who grant free health care to their wards. In vein, you will scour AP or AFP coverage over the decades to discover “the brutal dictatorship of Fidel Castro.” Rather, here is another recent piece of left-wing journalism (the NYT) rhapsodic over a different Latin caudillo.  “The Socialist-inspired movement of the late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela led to gains in education and health care, but the country has sunk into hunger, unrest and dictatorship.”  This “hunger, unrest and dictatorship” seems to be quite the mystery.  Take note of how respectful this is – “the late President” … his “Socialist-inspired movement” and so many “gains.”

The Spanish Civil War remains the 20^th century prototype of the trending victim ideology. A lot of Franco’s victims were from Catalonia. Catalonia’s secessionist ambitions were a big part of the civil war, and it was, both materially and ideologically, the most vigorous region in opposition to the Nationalists. It was also an anarchist stronghold and the place where George Orwell observed for posterity in Homage to Catalonia the crushing of the non-Stalinist left (POUM) by Stalin’s NKVD. Today it offers an exotic fusion of hyper leftwing politics, academics and social justice activism. Visited now it would be sort of like a Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor and San Francisco all rolled together in a beautiful Mediterranean setting.  Standing in front of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia you might think you had just dropped some acid. To see today’s left rapidly decomposing, debauched pathologies proudly on an in-your-face display, go to Barcelona – a depressing contrast to conservative, still-somewhat-Catholic, Madrid.

However, to answer the question posed above: Did the Spanish Civil War really end in 1939 when the Republicans surrendered and the shooting stopped?  No. Two separate thoughts apply here. First, it was a civil war and, unlike conventional wars where the losers sue for peace and the winners, content with the terms, go home, the victors and the vanquished (for the most part) have to live together – intimately in some cases. The victors take their revenge, daily, in ways big and small. For the vanquished, the experience of resentment that never ceases to fester and is passed through the generations. Moreover, resentment, if properly nourished and managed, can become a powerful political weapon. In Spain, it has. Flip Clausewitz and you have the current Spanish Civil War as conducted by the Marxists: “Politics is the continuation of war by other means.”

Second, is that the Spanish Civil War is, perhaps, unique in the 20^th century as a political rebellion where the forces of reaction prevailed against a well-organized, highly energized far-left terrorism supported by and aligned with the liberal and left-wing elites in politics, the universities and haute culture. Also unique is that the narrative of the Spanish Civil War that eventually triumphed was produced and widely promulgated not by the winners (Francoists) but by the losers (the left). Its success was due in large part to its simplicity as a tragic, but inspirational morality play. The freedom-loving, democratically elected Republicans, supported and defended by the International Brigades, succumbed to the tides of Spanish fascism under the leadership of General Francisco Franco, goose stepping in a junior partnership with Hitler and Mussolini.

This is the widely promulgated Manichean version of the Spanish Civil War – the forces of Good, advancing democracy, equality and freedom, confronting Evil in the form of fascism with its instinctive brutality, militarist atavism and racial bigotry. It is wonderfully free of any moral ambiguity – the losers as heroes and martyrs in opposition to tyranny and oppression, abandoned by the Western democracies; the winner, a cretin mediocrity who took his revenge, built his dictatorship and finally drifted into senescence.

In 2012, the British Marxist, Paul Preston, published a massive tomb, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. Just the title and sub-title alone are a vicious smear; of course, the Catholic Church meets Auschwitz. Preston, a prolific and erudite Spanish Civil War historian, is widely read and admired in Spain. His Spanish Holocaust, however, is in keeping with the left’s reductio ad hitlerum approach to modern history. In the Prologue he writes: “I thought long and hard about using the word ‘holocaust’ in the sub-title of this book. I feel intense sorrow and outrage about the Nazis’ deliberate attempt to annihilate European Jewry. I also feel intense sorrow and outrage about the lesser but none the less, massive suffering undergone by the Spanish people during the Civil War of 1936—9 and for several years thereafter, I could find no other word that more that more accurately encapsulates the Spanish experience than ‘holocaust’.” I also feel intense sorrow and outrage reading this book, but many words could be found to show how tendentious, dishonest and outrageous Preston’s choice for his title really is, but suffice it to say that he is entirely consistent in playing the left’s tiresome game of the brown smear and preserving the fiction of the Spanish Civil War as fascism crushing democracy.  

Relieved of its romantic For Whom the Bell Tolls mythology, however, the historiography of the Spanish Civil War, thanks to the herculean labors of researchers like Burnett Bolloten and Stanley Payne, gives way in large part to the contemplation of communist (Stalinist) duplicity and treachery heavily cloaked in the rhetoric of democracy, equality and freedom.  While contributing human and material assets to the Spanish Republicans ostensibly to resist the fascist rebels, Stalin’s NKVD agents were moving through Spain rounding up, torturing and murdering dissident communists, like Andreu Nin, taking control of the Army and insinuating themselves deeply into positions of governmental power. Stalin’s Trojan horse modus operandi in Spain was a dress rehearsal for how the communists would operate to support the unfolding of “democracy” in devastated counties like Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Poland at the end of World War II, countries that we all know became models of social equality and so bursting with confidence, prosperity and opportunity that no one was allowed to leave.

During this civil war, Stalin’s assassins were also chasing his former revolutionary colleague, Leon Trotsky, around the globe and killing his family members until the Soviet-trained Spaniard, Ramon Mercader, murdered him in Mexico City in 1940. Mercader’s mother, incidentally, was Caridad del Río Hernández, an ardent communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and doubled as a Soviet agent.The Leon Trotsky of Stalin’s invention and dissemination was supposedly in league with Franco and the fascists. In historical retrospect, it is difficult to conceive how such a preposterous fiction could have taken hold with anyone, but Stalin’s dramaturgical skill in service to his jealousy and megalomania was second only to the eager gullibility of his acolytes and fellow travelers.

 

“Fascist” in Stalin’s lexicon was his preferred term of abuse for whomever at the moment he saw as a competitor for power, his enemy du jour. Stalinists reserve their resentment for those who compete with them for power. Inside the Soviet Union from 1936 through 1938, Stalin purged the bulk of the old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and the senior officer corps, men who, like Trotsky, were supposedly in league with the fascists. These were individuals, most of whom were deeply committed communists, revolutionaries from the early days of the Bolshevik revolution. But Stalin feared and loathed them because he viewed them as competitors for his own power base within the party. Into Spain with the support of Santiago Carrillo and his Spanish communist followers, he exported his signature calumnies, purges, show trials with the accompanying tortures and executions. His agents moved against Francisco Largo Caballero and the socialists with a ferocity and ruthlessness that was directed against the forces of Franco in lesser proportions.  All of the non-Stalinist left in Spain at one time or another during the civil war were linked to or tarnished with the label of fascist.

    

With “fascism” being so protean and flexible, how absurd to try to render the Spanish Civil war as a battle of democracy against fascism when in many ways it more resembles a replay of French Jacobins against the ancien régime. However, the resemblance is imperfect. Franco did manage militarily to crush the Republicans and punish and purge all the Spanish leftists he could get his hands on. He also tried mightily to make 20^th century Spain into an earlier Catholic Spain, not exactly a strictly fascist sort of obsession, evidenced also by his marginalizing of the Falange. But his 36 year-long “brutal dictatorship” was largely a bust. The Spanish Jacobins came roaring back, literally. After Franco’s death in 1975, the legendary Spanish Communist and devout Stalinist, La Pasionaria, Deloris Ibárruri of “No pasarán” fame returned to Spain from exile in the Soviet Union and eventually took an elected seat in the Spanish Parliament.  General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) Santiago Carrillo also returned to Spain from the Soviet Union. Carrillo, a Stalinist errand boy and butcher, had supervised the Paracuellos massacres by a Republican faction in 1936. He also arranged for the murder of those Spanish communists who had incurred Stalin’s disapproval. Back in post-Franco Spain, Carrillo joined Ibárruri in Parliament. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2005. La Pasionaria and Carrillo, both very old, with bloody hands and unrepentant, died, so to speak, in the “odour of sanctity” in the crumbling remnants of Franco’s Spain.

Post-Franco, it seemed like only minutes before Spain joined the rest of secularist, consumerist, western Europe with all the once-forbidden goodies – liberated women, no-fault divorce, gay rights, abortion (eventually).  With the fading of a Catholic Spain and the Iberian embrace of secular hedonism, you might think that the Spanish Marxists would be happy. But, no. Leftists everywhere are unhappy and resentful.  Resentment brings victims (as subjects of political patronage) and targets victimizers (as objects of proscription and revenge). In the U.S. the victims are “people of color” and the victimizers are white racists, committed to the retention of their “privilege” and the pursuit of their “supremacy.” In Spain, the left has Franco as the great victimizer, having achieved, per Paul Preston, Hitler status.  When you have yet another Hitler in place, there are ample victims for consideration and no place to hide for those who cannot quite grasp the new reality. Franco, unlike Hitler, won his war, and the Spanish, unlike the post WWII Germans subjected to de-Nazification, have eluded a de-Francoization. But the left persists. In 2007 the Socialist Party passed the eerie sounding “Law of Historical Memory” which, formally condemned the Franco regime and began the process of the dismantling of all things Franco in Spain – statues, street names, etc.  – and someday, Franco’s memorial and tomb, Valle de los Caidos. The Spanish Civil War is not over, at least not for the left in Spain.

Post-Charlottesville: We Are on Our Own

We on the right owe something to the leftist mob that, with the assistance and connivance of the state and local authorities, assaulted the lawfully and peacefully assembled protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia last August 13th. Thanks to the Antifas, whatever fleeting illusions or fantasies we may have nurtured about living in a society where there are institutions to protect people who dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy have evaporated. Charlottesville was a watershed 21^st century moment revealing that the Sovietization of the U.S. (21^st century style) is nearly complete.

Since the official interpretation of this Virginia riot seems to one of a resurgent fascism raising its ugly head, it may help to remember how the Soviets in their heyday used “fascism” to keep their fact-free storyline intact and tighten the party’s suffocating grip on the throat of even the puniest of opposition. During those days when the CPSU was calling all the shots on behalf of the Russian proletariat, they relied on an impregnable ideology that happened to explain just about everything that needed explaining. Facts, figures, the reality of empirical discovery and confirmation were secondary to the “reality” in the form of a creation myth fashioned by the CPSU philosophers. It was continuously embellished and promulgated to keep the vodka-besotted peons from beginning to realize that things in the promise land were not quite right and that the people in charge were an assortment of liars, psychopaths and criminals.

The myth in a nutshell was that Lenin, Stalin and their ensemble of good guys at just the right moment of history had taken power on behalf of oppressed toiling masses and were building the socialist workers paradise that Karl Marx had predicted eventually would be installed everywhere. On the way, these good guys encountered some very bad guys – Hitler, Mussolini, the faces of fascism and enemies of humanity – who temporarily disrupted the grand march of progress to abundance and equality. For a while the future did not look so good for Stalin’s utopian pretentions, but with the help of a naïve and enfeebled FDR and a cynical Churchill, the General Secretary got to watch Hitler, Mussolini and the fascist world they threatened to impose come crashing down and see himself emerge victoriously as the world’s greatest anti-fascist, pieces of Hitler’s chard skeleton retrieved by the Red Army from the Fuhrer bunker in Berlin as his most prized trophy. Historically, symbolically and politically, fascism was dead, but fascists of a certain sort could now be permanently featured as key performers in the governing ideology, enemies of progress ready to be summoned for duty when they were most needed. Fascism, as it turns out, had never been completely vanquished and whenever and wherever things went wrong, the reincarnated Hitlers and Mussolinis appeared on cue triggering, of course, the resurgence of anti-fascist brigades to stomp them down once again and modestly proclaim their own courage and heroism.

        

If the recent history of the Charlottesville debacle and its frenzied media aftermath were somehow to be dubbed into Russian and tweaked a bit, the entire sorry episode could easily be imagined to have been staged somewhere in Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson who was, now brace yourself and grab a teddy bear for comfort, a slave owner. His famous home, Monticello, is just outside the city. Soon expect him to be thrust into the cultural Marxists’ rouges gallery of once great Americans because his life did not meet the moral standards set by the likes of Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters. Only in a society completely slipped off its moorings and ruled by a mafia-style clique of pretend champions of the oppressed could cretins like Sharpton and the mobs he leads into the streets be seriously attended to by the mainstream media and courted by the power brokers.

Jefferson’s UVA is now a festering academic cesspool of cultural Marxism, about as a hospitable a venue for right-wing protestors as Berkeley, Madison or Ann Arbor. Just thinking the wrong thoughts in places like this can get you assaulted. The “Unite the Right” (UtR) protestors were the perfect patsies in this pathetic “morality” drama. They were set up to be the chief (the only) villains by the power players ranging from Virginia Governor Terry “Mr. Clintonista” McAuliffe, Charlottesville Mayor, Michael Signer, an understudy of Hillary Clinton-handler, John Podesta, and their police stooges who perp-walked the hapless UtR protestors into the teeth of the masked, club-wielding Antifas, who, incidentally, unlike the patsies, had no permit to assemble. The rioting ensued, people were beaten up and a woman was killed by a man, James Fields, in his car attempting to escape the rampaging antifas. Fields, has now experienced an American-style show trial (prosecutor, defender and judge all working in concert) and will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

How then did those who run the opinion-shaping, attitude-adjusting organs of mass media, the major instruments of mediation and interpretation of events like this, explain to the American people what had happened? Predictably, they seemed to have had no inclination to look carefully at the facts and circumstances and raise questions that might have led to more than the usual predicable fascist, racist smear of people who don’t necessarily believe that white racism pulsates from every crevice of American life and justifies the recreational burning down of the cities. This rampant racism, apparently, not only infects people and institutions but stone and marble as well, and the professional grievance mongers and the rabble they arouse are now assaulting the statues and monuments they reckon to be contaminated.

President Trump provoked hysteria from the “virtue professionals” posing as journalists when he refused to parrot the lines from the Pravda-like scripts of the New York Times, Washington Post and the cable news networks rejecting their standard “fascists-evil/anti-fascists-good” trope dating back to the early days of Stalin’s masterful political dramaturgy. His Soviet Union was always locked in mortal combat with fascists of some sort, but who they were depended on whom he had it in for at the particular moment. In the run up to Hitler’s chancellorship they were “Social Fascists” the German Social Democrats who, by playing by the rules of constitutional politics, were obstructing the path to world revolution. When Hitler finished strangling the Weimar Republic, Stalin switched to the Popular Front and the Social Fascists became needed democrat allies in opposition in the face of German rearmament. The British were fascists until the summer of 1941 when Hitler, then Stalin’s partner in the rape of Poland and the Baltic states, double crossed him and launched Barbarossa, after which they became his allies.  How one becomes a fascist, you might say, is situationally dependent on the left’s current priorities.

The fury over Trump’s rejection of the Pravda script and his refusal to sanctify the criminality of masked, armed thugs simply because they were self-proclaimed “anti-fascists” became part of a greater on-going setup, a stepping up of the relentless efforts of the left to de-legitimate his election. Don’t forget: during the 2016 Presidential campaign Trump himself was routinely denounced by columnists in the major outlets, as well as Democrats and Republicans, as a fascist. Post-election, the “resistance” was born; the “fascist” motif never for a moment abates. Trump’s supporters, recall, were consigned by Hillary Clinton late in the campaign to the moral trash heap as “irredeemables” because they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it.” Well, yes, you can probably go on with the naming game for a long time – there is always a new victim group to be identified and cultivated with its own unique “-ism” or “-phobia”, one more target of “hate” – but “fascist” probably captures the generic essence of bigotry that can be manifested in so many recondite forms.  

Charlottesville became the perfect storm and fueled the left’s continuing paranoid fantasy of an impending fascist America. Ignored is the fact that Klansmen, neo-Nazis and neo-Fascists supposedly on the verge of taking over are such a fringe element in American society so far removed from any sources of power and influence that without the left to constantly raise them to the status of a threatening political force they would probably disappear altogether. But the Southern Poverty Leadership Conference needs them to sustain their fund raising and luxury Birmingham, Alabama digs, and the broader left needs them with all of their crude imagery to smear the right and as a fulcrum for their hysterical moral posturing.

The Democrats always burst orgasmic anytime a real live Klansman or neo-Nazi sallies out from the shadows and gets some attention which means they can pretend that hooded lynch mobs are lurking on every corner and that every conservative is Bull Connor or George Lincoln Rockwell. Not to be outdone, the Republican traveling carnival of gelded hacks – Marco Rubio, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and, of course, Mitt Romney – did not hesitate to join the chorus of Democrat trained seals sounding like they had just emerged from a “white privilege” indoctrination session led by Barack Obama. Marco Rubio, the classic empty suit, with no intention of the irony tweeted: “When an entire movement built on anger & hatred towards people different than you, it justifies & ultimately leads to violence against them.” Little Marco, apparently, is unable to grasp meaning of psychological projection.

It is tempting to say that it could be worse, that with a shift in a few tens of thousands of votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin last November Hillary Clinton would be staggering around the White House plotting her revenge on the “basket of deplorables,” another “wise Latina” or a Black Lives Matter savant would be on the Supreme Court, and “hate speech” legislation would be wending its way through Congress. This is not much comfort, however. Trump, whatever his intentions may have been, will never “drain the swamp” and his Presidency is no serious threat to the cultural Marxist hegemon. It is a temporary bump in the road that will probably end very badly before the next scheduled election.  

There is no part of the establishment – the political parties and the Federal behemoth, the courts, the MSM and the entertainment industry, public schools and the universities – that has not embraced the mindless orthodoxy that equates any and all resistance to the cultural Marxists’ program of white guilt indoctrination, with its de rigueur confessional and self-flagellating rituals, as a form of fascism that must be extirpated. There seems to remain no serious institutional, political or legal obstacles to the escalating predations of the left’s shock troops, Black Lives Matter and the Antifas who, like Mao’s Red Guard of the 1960s and 70s are mounting a cultural revolution and marauding with a destructive fury that promises a complete ruination of what is left of traditional America. An avalanche of slander, lies and abuse is raining down from all corners, and a mailed fist in full force is falling on the resistance to it; we are on our own.

Nicholas Kristof -- Away with the Hitler Metaphors

You have to give the devil his due, and the devil I speak of is Nicholas Kristof, a preening, self-righteous ideologue who pretends to be a journalist. He belongs to a very exclusive troupe of professional pontificators known as New York Times columnists.  These haughty sycophants serve the Democrat party in a Pravda sort of way, predictably parroting its officially sanctioned propaganda talking points and relentlessly hectoring and smearing any and all outliers who might resist the iron fisted orthodoxy peddled by the “progressives”.  For the shills who man the loud speakers of progressive politics the only obstacle to the complete institutionalization of the progress they envision for all of the lesser lights under their tutelage is the moral malignancy of the political opposition, immersed as it always is in the evil of racism and its progeny, sexism, homophobia, and on we go to infinity. There can be no good faith opposition to progressive policies which embody everything that is good, just mean, selfish people who discriminate and hate. Boiled down to its essence progressive politics is about really good people who should be in charge (them), and very bad ones who should not (us). 

By my count there are nine of these regular pulpiteers, the best known likely being the globe-trotting, blow hard, Thomas Friedman, a prolific but mediocre wordsmith unsurpassed in being able to say so much about things of which he knows so little.  A close second might be the supremely arrogant and condescending Paul Krugman, a master of vitriol who at some point forsook economics to become a party scribbler, a hack ideologue who preaches only to his own little choir.  Oh yes, and there is the NYT-designated resident “conservative” in the claque, David Brooks, who in 2008 swooned over the “crease” in Obama’s slacks, an intellectual pretender who seems to be taken seriously only by himself.

But my favorite, as suggested above, is Nicholas Kristof who is the complete New York Times columnist package, political correctness incarnate. He is more akin to the “good cop” of the NYT enforcers and goes busily about, hither and yon, proclaiming himself as the “voice” of the oppressed, specifically, those “victims” chosen by the Democrats and most recently by Hillary Clinton.  These are the various mythically persecuted legions who needed protection from the rampant bigotry of the millions of “deplorable” voters who for some inexplicable reason could not stomach the prospect of a professional grifter and her sexual predator consort once again polluting the rooms of the White House.  

More in contact with reality than Friedman, more condescending but less openly arrogant and vitriolic than Krugman, less ponderous and intellectually pretentious than Brooks, Kristof is the perfect progressive -- earnest, oozing with compassion, his sensitive moral antennas ever alert to pick up the faintest signals of any of the “isms” or “obias” (racism, sexism, xenophobia, “you name it”, as Hillary croaked to her LGBT groupies in New York) wafting up from and infesting those vast regions of the country outside of the DC Beltway, Manhattan, Boston, Hollywood, and our staunch bastions of free-speech and moral courage, the universities.    

You have to experience Kristof in person – his irritating, prissy sounding voice and goody-two-shoes demeanor -- to really appreciate what a smarmy, self-promoting, snake oil salesman he is. Some years ago I sat through a slide show he gave at a university in Ohio, the content, as I vaguely remember, the tear-jerking details of one of his many sojourns through a third world hell hole.  All in all, however, the talk was all about Kristof.  He is a master of what now is called “virtue signaling” – following the proper grievance mongering protocols, publically voicing your deep concern for the oppressed, the point being that everyone needs to know that goodness beats in your heart -- and a university audience was the perfect venue for him to hit all of the right notes to demonstrate his compassion for the right kinds of people, who are, of course, victimized by the worst sorts of people, and, we all know who those people are.

Kristof’s columns as well are tributes to his virtue.  The best of his most recent efforts came shortly after his world came a tumbling down with the election of Donald Trump.  Thus: “A Twelve Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/a-12-step-program-for-responding-to-president-elect-trump.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fnicholas-kristof&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=collection&_r=0

This piece is vintage Kristof, just the title alone with Kristof playing the therapist for the traumatized millions who, unfortunately, believed the the New York Times pundits as they confidently proclaimed that Hillary would follow Obama into the White House.  Things didn’t quiet work out the way the wise men thought they were supposed to, and the surprise election of the “racist”, “sexist”, “xenophobic”, “you name it” Trump was not simply an electoral defeat for the progressives. It is now, you see, January 30, 1933 once again, and Adolf Benito Grand Kleagle Trump will soon be resting his jack booted feet on the White House coffee tables. When you make every possible effort to paint your opponent as Hitler, Mussolini, the voice of the Klan, too vicious, stupid and incompetent to win – and he wins, yikes! – well, “it’s your party and you can cry if you want to.” But reality must at some point intrude even for Saint Nicholas. The Reichstag is not on fire. Time for the grief counselors to go home.  Kristof must rally the cry babies.

 “A Twelve Step Program” does not read well on a queasy stomach, but it does capture the essence of the ideology that defines Kristof’s New York Times hermetic world. Here we go.

“I will accept that my side lost, but I won’t acquiesce in injustice and I will gird for battle on issues I care about.”  Yeah, “gird for battle” -- wouldn't you like to see Nicky in a You Tube video girding himself up. As noted above, the opposition does not operate in good faith and its victory in the election means the subversion of justice. The “battle” will continue which means the racism-sexism propaganda barrage will be ramped up.  Much of what Kristof writes turns into verbal smog:  what exactly would he be doing if he “acquiesced in injustice”?  As if anyone would suggest that he would – more virtue signaling.

“I will avoid demonizing people who don’t agree with me about this election, recognizing that it’s as wrong to stereotype Trump supporters as anybody else.” Well, this sounds nice and civil of him, but don’t get your hopes up, because … “I’ll call a local mosque to offer support, or join an interfaith event. I will sign up for an “accompany my neighbor” list if one exists for my area, to be an escort for anyone who is now in fear.”  The horror, the fear, yes, indeed.  Kristallnacht is next on the agenda.  You see, those Trump supporters he instructed you not to demonize are now out on the streets hoping to be able to beat up your Muslim neighbors on their way to prayer.  As I recall, the last ethnic people in the U.S. to be rounded up and placed in detention camps were Japanese Americans, done under the administration of … wait a minute …. Democrat Patron Saint, Franklin D. Roosevelt, opposed by Democrat arch villain, J. Edgar Hoover.

“I will avoid Hitler metaphors, recognizing that they stop conversations and rarely persuade.”  This one is really worth parsing.  The Nazi name-calling tactic didn’t work so well for the election. “Nazi” and “Republican” have been interchangeable for long time, so maybe a different approach is needed. Kristof counsels his readers to eschew Hitler metaphors not because he believes they are wrong, but because those rubes who voted for the Klansman aren’t buying it. 

“I’ll do my part to support the society I’d like to see. I’ll eat Chobani yogurt because its owner has been subjected to racist attacks for his willingness to hire and promote refugees. Likewise, I will give blood and register for organ donation — for at least they’ll make me feel better. As will a tub of Chobani.”  This might be the best one of all.  You eat the politically correct food, feel good about yourself, (feeling good about yourself is really what this is all about) and …. “support the society [you’d] like to see”. Clearly, he doesn’t like the society he sees now. And, what kind of society might that be?  One without racists. Kristof is a one trick pony and yet once more, the de rigueur “racist” smear.  Of what race are refugees?

“I may not be able to prevent a sexual predator from reaching the White House, but at events I attend, I may be able to prevent a sexual predator from assaulting a drunken partygoer.” Whoa, where did this come from? Maybe Kristof is laying awake nights in anguish, worrying that President Trump will be lounging in the Oval Office commandeering blow jobs from the twenty-something interns he keeps in tow and ejaculating on their dresses. With Hillary and Bill back in the White House, this, of course, would never have been a concern. But we will look forward in the times ahead for reports from Kristof’s heroic efforts at stopping sexual predators from assaulting drunks at parties. Perhaps there are a lot of them in the parties he goes to.  Maybe Bill Clinton will be at some of them with his travel pal from the “Lolita Express,” convicted sex-offender, Jeffrey Epstein.    

“I will not lose hope. I will keep reminding myself that politics zigs and zags, and that I can do more than shout in the wind. I can fight for my values even between elections, and even at the micro level I can mitigate the damage to my neighbors and attempt to heal a social fabric that has been rent.”  This is step 12, the last chirp in this particular installment of “fight the good fight” from the ideological cocoon Kristof lives in.  What is he hoping for? What is the “social fabric that has been rent”, and how does one "heal a social fabric"? This is some sort of therapeutic-sounding babble. What is “damage” that has been done his neighbors? The person they voted for lost the election.  In an election someone has to lose. “What is the “mitigation” involved?  None of these questions Kristof could answer in language that connects with anything other than the abstract, anodyne pieties that he constantly employs to bolster his delusions of moral heroism and perfection. His agony is now that the wrong people are now in charge, and he will continue toiling away with his non-stop accusations of hatred and bigotry.

Woodrow Wilson meets his Princeton Students

                                                                                                        

 

 

Students gather inside Nassau Hall during a sit-in, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015, in Princeton, N.J. The protesters from a group called the Black Justice League, who staged a sit-in inside university President Christopher Eisgruber's office on Tuesday, demand the school remove the name of former school president and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from programs and buildings over what they said was his racist legacy.

Poor Woodrow Wilson. His reputation is being savaged by young political radicals at the very institution (Princeton University) where he reigned as President before becoming New Jersey Governor and then the 28th President of the United States. Wilson was an early 20^th century avatar of the “progressivism” that Barack, Hillary and their ilk claim make them our inevitable saviors. 

Wilson’s current detractors practice a Stalinist historiography of sorts that seeks to “erase” anyone or anything from history they perceive to be ideologically contaminated.  Just as Stalin had Leon Trotsky expunged from Soviet history for his deviationism, Wilson is on his way to being a non-person for believing what many if not most American politicians of his era similarly believed, that black Americans were inferior to white Americans. The celebrated American President has become one more piñata for the contemporary Left to whack away at, but only recently.  After all, he was a Democrat and, as mentioned, a “progressive” and an intellectual, a trifecta of goodness for today’s cultural Marxists whose capacity for forgiveness is vast for anyone who expounds liberal-left pieties and is not tainted by any sort of conservative affiliation or an aversion to the dismantling of the traditional social institutions, like marriage. 

But the bar has been raised and Wilson has recently been “outed” by the angry Maoists at Princeton University as: white, Christian and a segregationist. This, of course, is only breaking news to the students who make it to the Ivies these days in a combined state of historical hibernation and high dudgeon.  Awakened, they find it unbearable to imagine that the world outside the cocoon that protects their PC existence might harbor unpleasant realities that they have to grapple with.  The students have called for the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/nov/23/princeton-woodrow-wilson-racism-students-remove-name

All of this is richly ironic since Wilson himself was a model for today’s self-righteous, censorious pontificators of the Left who perceive themselves as uniquely virtuous and are unable to tolerate anyone who does not swoon or at least capitulate when they dispense their moral certainties followed by the non-negotiable demands.

Winston Churchill nicely captured the American President’s uniquely grandiose sense of intellectual and moral superiority when he encountered him Paris in 1919.  Wilson arrived at the Peace Conference expecting to preside over it like a modern day Solomon and then observe the world harmony that would follow upon the recognition of his unparalleled wisdom of his Fourteen Points and their practical implementation.

“The French plan, however, did not at all commend itself to Mr. Wilson. It thrust on one side all the pictures of the peace conference which his ambition and imagination had painted. He did not wish to come to speedy terms with the European Allies; he did not wish to meet their leading men around a table; he saw himself for a prolonged period at the summit of the world, chastening the Allies, chastising the Germans and generally giving laws to mankind.” (Churchill, Winston S. (2013-09-23). The World Crisis, Vol. 4 (Winston Churchill's World Crisis Collection) (Kindle Locations 1587-1590). Rosetta Books. Kindle Edition.)

The complicated and monumental scope of Wilson’s life and career has collided with the crude reductionism of today’s identity politics and the clamoring campus Neanderthals who practice this ascendant tribalism.  So, for whatever else he was and did, Wilson is now rendered that singular, pathetic entity, the worst sort one can imagine these days … are your prepared? – a racist, which means nullification and erasure of his name from public places.

The Left now seems to be increasingly devoted to symbols, particularly to their circumscription. The scope of what they deem “offensive” constantly expands in direct correlation to the ever enlarging sense of their moral perfection and quivering, delicate sensitivity. With this conviction of moral perfection comes a furious compulsion to make the world they look out upon completely and consistently reflect their own unalloyed goodness and purity. And when it does not, they demand that it must. Any opposition or reluctance must be immoral or criminal. Symbols like the Confederate flag and statutes of Confederate generals spark their fury. Statues, street names, commemorative flags, even menus are symbols that give off coded messages that tell the wrong story. And for the Left, only one story is to be told.  Competition would be “hurtful” and thus not allowed.

The PC lexicon of the Left also offers a redefined meaning of “safety” consistent with the solipsism that seems to have enveloped the entire enterprise.  Solipsism is the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.  Safety now means that one must be completely insulated from ideas, arguments, memories that might be troubling, which means that, above all, self-regard must be inflated, feelings protected, the “self” in effect must remain undisturbed by the intrusion of hurtful reality, completely swathed in its pristine ideological purity.   

This solipsistic bent of the leftwing ideologue is connected with self-esteem and the need to appear and feel virtuous.  Politics becomes fundamentally personal and self-referential.   Any given political act – how I vote, what protest I attend, what politician I execrate or deify – is determined by how virtuous it will make me feel.  The self is both the starting point and the final destination. This is why so much of leftwing politics is so given to theater and performance that features the participants making dramatic, emotional expression of their convictions.  Calling a conservative leader or candidate “Hitler” is a hyper-dramatic gesture that tells everyone how strongly I feel about what an awful person he is, how exquisite is my moral outrage, so why not call him the worst name I can think of, even it is silly? Obama’s 2008 campaign chant of his followers, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” is a masterpiece solipsistic mantra.  Nothing else exists outside of the “we” who waits and the very same “we” who is to arrive and take charge.  Politics is nothing less than the celebration of our own perfection.

Wilson’s recent take down is just another example of how the Marxist vision of history as the singular story of oppressors and those they oppress continues to operate and how it shapes the moral universe of today’s progressives and predictably guides their tactics.  Their world is continuously populated with new victims, which of course have histories of victimhood, each with a different crop of oppressors, some of whom are still in come circles held in high regard.  Political activism for them is the business of delegitimizing, as the French Jacobins in their demolition of the Ancien régime would cry:  écrasez l'infâme (crush the infamous thing). The past and all the evil it symbolizes must be erased.  High regard for the wrong people such as Woodrow Wilson is not legitimate and must not be tolerated.  

Unfortunately, as we look back over the last 100 years or so, the “delegitimizers” (“revolutionaries” as they called themselves – Bernie Sanders now claims to be one) who seek power so as to make the world much better than the one they execrate inevitably give way to the nihilists who believe in nothing but holding on to their own power.  In none of the utopias built by the great delegitimizers – Lenin, Mao, Fidel, Chavez – did anything emerge other than a ruling class made up of sociopaths more corrupt and venal that the original “oppressor” class they dispossessed.  

The Democrats, who were recently determined to make a woman under criminal investigation President, apparently wanted to move directly from idealism to stagnation and corruption, Leonid Brezhnev style.  It work out so well in Argentina with Kristina Kirchner, why not here. It is the robotic, seemingly embalmed while still alive Brezhnev who Hillary most closely resembled politically, a career ideological hack, a nihilist who believed in nothing other than his entitlement to power and the enjoyment of all of its special perks.  
     

History for the Left remains the story of oppression. It is increasingly a barren region with little to celebrate and many to execrate. So many to bring down, so little time.