Yep, Can’t Wait for That!
By Ed Driscoll, whose erection seems to have endured for more than four hours:
As Jonah Goldberg has written recently, the Amazon page for his upcoming book has become one of the frontlines in the cold civil war: when it’s not being hacked, it’s subject to the worst sort of derogatory comments and innuendo. I’m about a third of the way through the galleys of Jonah’s book, which makes all of the shadowboxing of the Amazonians all the more astonishing: having not seen the actual contents of the book themselves, it’s fascinating how they’re driving themselves insane over merely a title, a subhead, and a book cover. It will be interesting to see how the dialogue changes once the book starts getting into the hands of readers, and its ideas start being discussed in the Blogosphere and beyond.
Just so as we’re all up to speed on this, here’s a refresher on Doughbob’s “argument,” which of course “has never been made in such detail or with such care”:
Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.
I’d like to join Ed Driscoll in gleefully anticipating the day that pinata rolls off the presses and into the strike zone of — among other groups — historians of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. I know this has probably been pointed out, like, a bazillion times already, but it bears repeating.