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The Greatest (anti-Fascist) Generation
A highly esteemed conservative blogger is James Lileks, whose work is referred to with great deference by other conservative bloggers, especially those at the top-rated conservative blog, Powerline. Whenever I have followed a link to Lileks’s writings, however, I have not been impressed, and so have read very little of him. Now I see he is also a mainstream columnist. In an article for the Newhouse News Service, he writes:
The popular culture is finally beginning to deal with 9/11 in earnest, but it’s doing so with the usual modern mix of internationalist pieties and timid, politically correct drivel. In World War II, the movies had a clear message: The fascists needed to be defeated, and we were right to fight. Today’s message: Jihadists are people too, you know.It comes as news to me that America’s main purpose in fighting World War II was to “defeat fascism.” In my experience, ordinary Americans, political leaders, reporters, historians, and Hollywood movies have almost never described World War II, then or since, as a war against “fascism.” For one thing, the only fascist, or rather Fascist, country we were at war with was Italy, which was a far less important enemy than Germany and Japan. Germany was Nazi, which was a very different thing from Fascism. And the Japanese political system at the time was also never called fascist as far as I recall. In fact, the only people who spoke of the war as a “war against fascism” were the Communists. Using “fascism” as an umbrella term has always been a leftist ploy, used to make people believe that anything not of the radical left is fascist.
It seems that to be a respected “conservative” blogger and columnist today, all you have to do is sputter ahistorical liberal nonsense in the manner of Victor Hanson. Email entry |