Monday, June 15, 2009

The New Fascism

Nick Cohen of the (UK) Guardian:

Yet for all his roots in neo-Nazism, von Brunn was also a transitional figure who typified a wider range of forces than I can adequately squeeze into the "far right" label. He was an enthusiastic "truther", who went on the net to deny that the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington had surprised the conspirators in power who secretly controlled America. He hated Bill O'Reilly of Fox News and neocons as much as the New York Times and Obama. "It doesn't matter that you despise Jews-neocons-Bill O'Reilly," he declared in one of his incoherent internet postings. "You pay the kosher tax - or else you don't eat."


As he points out, the far left and the far right are meeting (and greeting) each other, espousing a new kind of fascism for the 21st century:

In Voodoo Histories, his elegant evisceration of the paranoid mentality, David Aaronovitch points out that former fascists and communists, secular Ba'athists, radical Islamists, Russian nationalists and America firsters - people who would never have worked together in the past, and who indeed killed each other in the past - are fusing ideas and creating a new ideology. Their politics, he writes, is "a loose coalescence of impulses: anti-globalisation, broadly anti-modernist and anti-imperialist - with imperialism being inevitably and solely associated with American power".


I think that's right on the money, which is one reason why I have rejected the idea that Troofers are solely creatures of the far left. Dylan Avery may be a traditional liberal, but Jason Bermas and Alex Jones and Luke Rudkowski plainly are not.

Hat Tip: Patrick from Cincinnati (in the comments).

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