re: #276 vitoc

Goldberg certainly has a couple of interesting and important points. Neither of those are exactly new though - for instance, the origins of Mussolini’s thinking have been pointed out before by others, and more conclusively - see Zeev Sternhell for this especially. One thing though is clear about this book, which is probably both a strength and a weakness: It is primarily a political book concerned with the present. It is NOT a historical study on the history of certain ideas, in particular it isn’t an academic study. I won’t hold that against the book, it is something that should be held in mind when reading it, though. Goldberg has my sympathies if he wants to show how statism is a danger to freedom. But he loses them once he ignores the existing scientific literature, and worse, original national socialist literature. Anyone who has read Hitler, Rosenberg and the likes in the original knows that it is absurd to call the nazis leftists.

It is not a concidence that there is no real debate among historians about this book…

Thanks. I actually did try to read Mein Kampf, back when I was in high school. “Turgid” doesn’t begin to describe it.

I’ll accept your premise that the Nazis may have come from the Right, but they totally discarded all that was good and decent of the Right in their pell-mell descent into totalitarianism. Totalitarianism of the the Left is virtually indistinguishable from that of the right. Except maybe the Nazis had better tailors.

Interesting, isn’t it, that a whacko left-wing moonbat like Cynthia McKinney is wound up in the same Judenhass as wingnuts like Stormfront?