Translation from Goldberg-speak to English

With apologies to Daring Fireball, we offer a translation from Goldberg-speak to English of selected portions of Jonah Goldberg's comments on Michael Ledeen's review of Liberal Fascism:

I really want to spend some considered time on this, but there's one point I want to throw my two cents in

Ledeen has a lot more neocon cred than me, so the fact that he effortlessly makes me look like a tool with his positive review means I can't even begin to offer a substantive rebuttal.

Michael seems to be saying that Nazism was primary about racism, not socialism.

Racialist philosophy formed the core of Nazism, but I have to downplay it since my political paymasters in America are widely considered to have a much more racist history than the people I attack with my book.

I think he's right and wrong

Fuck you, Ledeen.

I think he's forcing a hard intellectual distinction that doesn't need to be made.

Hard intellectual distinctions make me uncomfortable, because then I couldn't dip, duck, dive, and dodge out of the way of critiques against my book. I like to occupy an amorphous, ever-shifting intellectual ground, which allows me to constantly redefine what I really meant.

Socialism today is seen as a purely economic doctrine.

I don't know what Socialism is, but I'll talk about it anyway.

For many socialists and progressives, socialism was racism and racism was socialism.

Up is down, left is right.

Nazism was socialism for a race.

I'm as high as a kite.

The Nazi view was uglier and more extreme than anyone else's, but it was not philosophically so distinct from the views of many progressives in America and socialists in Britain.

See, Nazis and Progressives are the same. Sure, some of them committed the Holocaust and drove the world to the brink of ruin (whereas most of the others just talk a lot), but really they're philosophically not so distinct.

The fact that the “wrong” people were outbreeding the “right” ones would put Britain on the path of “national deterioration”

I know we have been promoting books by Steyn et al which say the exact same things about Muslims and Europe, but Steyn is allied with me philosophically, so he's a witty, sharp observer of the European malaise. Whereas the Progressives who said that stuff were fascists. See?

In short I think Michael's right that Nazism was primarily concerned with racism and not socialism

I've been saying this all along. Thankfully his insightful review confirms my central thesis.

but only if you define socialism in purely economic terms

Everybody else is wrong, though. Socialism isn't at all about economics.

The Nazis were socialists because they were racists, and they were racists because of the kind of socialism they embraced. Two sides of the same coin.

See, if I repeat that socialism and racism are really the same thing, I can actually call all Liberals implicit racists. Without ever saying it outright. With a bit of luck, Republican talking points will start referring to my book from now on to show that Liberals are the real racists out there.