[Peace-discuss] The myth of a new Nazism

[C G Estabrook]

http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-review/article/the-myth-of-a-new-nazism/21679#.W3I3ipNKiSO

[Corey Robin] This is a really excellent interview with Udi Greenberg, who's a European historian and specialist on Weimar, on why the analogy to fascism and Nazism is both historically inaccurate *and* politically unhelpful, if not dangerous. Among the historical differences he cites between the lead-up to the Nazis and today are the non-contingent centrality of anticommunism and class conflict to fascist politics, the glorification of war as an end unto itself (not just rhetorically but in practice; parenthetically, this was one of the reasons why I always found the fascist analogy much more persuasive, and why I pursued it, in the context of the neocons in the Bush regime, who really did celebrate warfare as an end unto itself), and the pervasiveness of mass political violence (forget the fascist analogy; there is far less mass violence in the streets today in the US than there was in the 1960s). That's part of the historical argument, which many of us have been pressing since this analogy first got invoked. The political argument—about how fascist analogies have worked among intellectuals throughout the 20th century, which comes from Daniel Bessner's new book as well as Udi's—is even more interesting, but you should read the interview.

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