Test Prep Idiots
Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)
All,
You likely did not read about Barrons’ apology for their inanely written AP European History study guide.
It is worth the read and you will be rewarded with quite a chuckle.
The specifics are that Clarence Thomas is officially a “fascist” but the underlining principle is that for mainstream historians, the bar for accuracy has remained unchanged for the last century or so but for the too influential far-left historians, as the Barron’s “clown show” demonstrates, there is no bar for historical accuracy.
What makes this a hoot (and ironically so) is that the definition of “fascist” is untethered to European history. Barron’s fairy tale it is not founded in objective historical research or mainstream or even progressive interpretations but lies wholly in far left “goofism” (that still passes as history in too many quarters).
Here is the Orwellian “doublethink” that Barron’s guide foisted upon its readers: That “fascism” is a reactionary movement of the capitalist right. Seriously?
Fascism or nationalist socialism was a major post-First World War radical socialist movement that welded together nationalism and socialism and by socialism we mean the European definition of the term used at that time i.e. state control of the means of production (after all, the guide was supposed to be about European history).
Recall that the topic at Hitler’s first meeting with the German Worker’s Party was about how and when to end capitalism, Mussolini was a life-long socialist, and listing all the anti-capitalist socialist policies they adopted after coming to power would take pages to recite.
Its great rival was communism that argued for not just state control but state ownership of all means of production. There was also a strong internationalist strain in communism as opposed to the nationalist focus of fascism.
Here is where the Bozo’s at Barron enter the twilight zone.
One thing that Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Trotsky all agreed upon was that the future lied in radical socialism. As a corollary point of agreement, all believed that liberal democracies were inescapably destined for the dustbin of history (great phrase that, Leon).
None of this has anything to do with Justice Clarence Thomas (a life-long advocate of liberal democracy).
It is apparent that the Thomas entry stemmed from bias and intellectual dishonesty. So why does this ilk of historical silliness persist?
Two reasons: Ideology and ignorance.
Ideological Bias
By the 1930s, the communists and fascists were locked in an immense struggle and the far-left in the West became mostly sympathetic to communism as compared to fascism (remember, liberal democracies were abhorred but also considered a dying breed and thus only of passing danger to the revolution).
This led the far left to transform the word “fascist” into a pejorative which they combined with the adoption of “reactionary” and a host of similarly demeaning terms to describe nationalist socialists, a vocabulary that far leftists use to this day.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the workers’ paradise: The Second World War came along.
As hoped for by the far left, nationalist socialism was defeated and communism emerged victorious but deeply troubling, those doggone liberal democracies also emerged victorious and stronger than ever.
What to do?
The far left never admits a fundamental mistake and it could not waste all the great propaganda efforts against fascist nationalist socialism so they took a lesson from Goebbels: If you repeat a lie often enough it can become the truth. (BTW, Goebbels was a more radical socialist than either Hitler or Mussolini)
The result was a brilliant display of “doublethink.”
The very same liberal democracies that eradicated fascism as a global threat, that opposed its brutal socialist control of society in favor of basic human freedoms and limited powers of government were now conflated into their opposite by the far left, the ultimate application of doublethink.
The problem of course is that doublethink is always a lie.
When leftist historians equate Justice Thomas with a fascist then their ideological bias is on full display.
Analytic Ignorance
I guess too many leftist historians failed Algebra I in high school. Putting communism on the far left and fascism on the far right may be fine if the subject is socialism. Otherwise, the argument lacks reason and any sense of good judgment.
Once non-socialist economic systems enter the mix, a linear model becomes impossible. Where do libertarianism or economic liberalism fit in? Where do free-market economies land except far away from the two extremes of communism and fascism? More subtly, where does a protectionist vice an “open door” economic system appear?
Perhaps even a two-dimensional model is too simplistic but it would do an immensely better job than the dull-witted and stale leftist one-dimensional model presented by Barron’s authors.
An honest historian could never have compared Justice Thomas to a Hitlerite (or Leninist for that matter).
Shame on the authors and shame on Barron.
Semper Fi,
Mike
