Creating Fables

(More thoughts from Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism)

In 1930s Germany one of the Jews' greatest offenses was that they were patriotic Germans! They believed in classical liberalism, which allowed for debate and discussion of issues in depth. The Nazis wanted to destroy everything and create a new fascist state.

In the 1960s in America the left convinced itself that there was something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely patriotic about running down America. "One kind of fascism sees the state as the replacement of God - another kind sees the state as God's agent or vehicle. In both cases, however, the State is the ultimate authority, the source and maintainer of values, and the guarantor of the new order."

LBJ represented the continuation of the liberal quest begun by Woodrow Wilson and his fellow progressives - the quest to create an all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing state, a state that assumes responsibility for every desirable outcome and takes the blame for every setback on the road to utopia, a state that finally replaces God."

JFK was killed by a deranged Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald. JFK was very much an anti-communist. But the left "created the fable that Kennedy died battling the "hate" of the political right. Never mind that Oswald had already tried to murder the former Army major general and prominent right-wing spokesman Edwin Walker or that, as the Warren Commission would later report, Oswald had an extreme dislike of the right-wing."