Ledeen Slags Goldberg.

I'm fairly certain that Michael Ledeen thinks he's written a positive review of Liberal Fascism. After all, he confesses, Jonah Goldberg is both his "buddy and boss" and, if the Pajamas Media abortion has taught us anything, the bedrock of the wingnut welfare system is backscratching. But consider: Ledeen writes that Goldberg

concludes that fascism really has a left-wing genetic code, and therefore it’s wrong to “blame” fascism on the right.

On this central claim, Jonah is at least half right.

Ouch!

Ledeen continues:

The great masterpiece that drew the blood lines from Robespierre to modern mass movements and regimes, is Jacob Talmon’s “The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,” now nearly half a century old. There’s no evidence that Jonah has read it. ... With specific regard to Italian fascism, the first time this thesis was advanced was in a book I coauthored in the early 1970s, in a book-length interview with Renzo De Felice, the great biographer of Mussolini. When De Felice pointed out that the fascist movement drew in part on the ideology of the French Revolution (although he stressed that the intellectual lineage was somewhat spurious), there was a firestorm of criticism from the Italian left, whose leading lights had always argued that fascism was a purely reactionary phenomenon, and that only left-wing movements could legitimately be called “revolutionary.”

It doesn’t seem that Jonah is aware of this literature.

Ledeen, after calling Goldberg an illiterate stooge, correctly notes that

Jonah wants to have us believe that fascism was ‘of the left.’

Oh?

While certain French revolutionary ideas played into the creation of the fascist movement, and while Mussolini started life as a Socialist, and while various radical anarcho-syndicalists supported Mussolini from the very beginning (and some remained to the end), it is still a real stretch to say that fascism was somehow leftist.

Indeed. But what about the Nazis?

The weakest part of the book has to do with the Nazis.

Ledeen quotes Goldberg as writing, “What mattered to (Hitler) was German identity politics.”

His reponse? "The best that can be said about this is that it’s imaginative."

Ouch again!