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Johnson denies he called me a Nazi
(Note: Charles Johnson has put up an insulting display that comes on if you click links from this site to his site. To see what I’m talking about, click on this link to his thread where I and others were called neo-Nazis. Therefore, in order to get to any LGF pages linked at VFR, right-click the link and copy the address, then paste the address into your browser.) A commenter at Little Green Footballs says to Charles Johnson that it was wrong of him to call me a Nazi or a Fascist (the commenter, who fully shares LGF’s negative take on me, does not say that the charge is false, but simply that it wasn’t worth the trouble). Johnson replies:
I never called Auster a “Nazi.” Not once. Didn’t happen. This is a typical tactic of these people, to distort and misrepresent. I did call him a ‘fascist sympathizer,’ because he’s a supporter of Vlaams Belang—and they are a fascist party. Hence, ‘fascist sympathizer.’This is like the leader of a lynch mob saying, “I didn’t lynch that guy, it’s a total lie to say I lynched him,” because he’s not the one who actually put the rope around the man’s neck. Here’s what happened, which is also explained in more detail in the earlier thread, “Lawrence ‘Springtime for Hitler’ Auster gets the LGF treatment.” Johnson at comment #180, quoted, in full, Render’s comment #170:
I only saw one line in that piece that I would really quibble about.This full quote of Render appears in Johnson’s comment. Johnson does not object in the slightest to Render’s statement that the eight named people are the pseudo intellectuals of the neo-Nazi movement. Nor does he take issue with Render’s sweeping statement that “One neo-nazi is a threat. Every neo-nazi is a threat,” which obviously was intended to include all the eight named people along with the entire neo-Nazi movement associated with Duke. Instead, Johnson simply treats Render’s comment as the preface and set-up for his own comment:
I’ve learned recently that neo-fascists are much more prominent in conservative circles than I had previously realized. There are other well-known pundits who are sympathetic to the fascists, too—I’ve drastically revised my opinion of more than a few people, e.g. Diane West, Richard Miniter, and several others.Johnson in this comment does not call me or the others “fascist sympathizers.” Instead, picking up on Render’s attack on us as neo-Nazis, he speaks of “neo-fascists” in conservative circles. Would the reader not think that Johnson’s “neo-fascists” are intended to include the eight named people? So his statement that he only called me a fascist sympathizer is false. Then, changing the subject to “other” pundits, namely West and Miniter, he explicitly calls West and Miniter fascist sympathizers. (And only in a much later comment, comment #243, does he refer to me, indirectly, as a “fascist sympathizing s___b__.”) But my above points, while correct, are relatively trivial, since no one makes distinctions at LGF, it is a single, indiscriminate group pile-on. No one ever says, “Look, that’s not correct, these people are not X, they’re Y.” The main point is that Johnson’s non-critical quotation of Render’s sweeping comment followed by Johnson’s own expansion on that comment clearly expresses approval of Render’s statement that we are neo-Nazis. Further proof that Johnson was associating himself with the charge that I am a Nazi is seen in the fact that when commenter Q said that I and Ian Jobling are not Nazis, Johnson rejected Q’s comment.
I am learning exactly what you’re about, Q. And I don’t like it one bit. Ian Jobling is a flat-out racist.Johnson does not say to Q, “Hmm, you’re right, Jobling and Auster are not Nazis, they may have views on race that I consider racist, but it’s wrong to call them Nazis.” Instead, he rejects Q’s comment in full, and then proceeds immediately to expel him from LGF for having defended Jobling and me from the charge of being Nazis. Not only that, but (as former LGF commenter Kevin V. explained in the previous thread) Johnson then proceeded to expel from LGF anyone who registered a negative “ding,” the equivalent of a disagreement, with his, Johnson’s comments. So, again, Johnson allowed no distinctions among the various statements made about me and others. In that thread, the charges of being “Neo-Nazi,” “Neo-fascist,” “fascist sympathizer,” and “racist,” were all part of one sweeping attack, in which no disagreement or qualifications were permitted. Yet now Johnson has the gall to claim himself innocent of calling me a Nazi. Again, all this is recounted in more detail, with direct quotes and links, here.
Also, consider again Johnson’s comment:
I did call [Auster] a ‘fascist sympathizer,’ because he’s a supporter of Vlaams Belang—and they are a fascist party. Hence, ‘fascist sympathizer.’Johnson thus confirms and embraces what I said about him in the earlier thread: that if someone defends Party X from Johnson’s charge that Party X is fascist, then that person becomes a fascist sympathizer. Johnson’s approach is the very embodiment of the totalitarian. Remember, the issue in my discussions here last fall (see for example this) wasn’t whether I personally support Vlaams Belang. I knew virtually nothing about VB prior to that controversy. The issue was whether Johnson’s statements linking Vlams Belang to Nazism were correct. I kept looking at Johnsons’s statements and at Vlaams Belang’s record and found no truth to Johnson’s charges. Yet for simply defending Vlaams Belang from Johnson’s statements, I become a “fascist sympathizer.” It is a disgrace that this low-level smear artist Charles Johnson has a large following, and that mainstream conservatives such as Powerline, Michelle Malkin, and, in particular, Robert Spencer, who attended the conference in Brussels that Johnson attacked, have failed to condemn him. . Gintas writes:
Charles Johnson sounds like a gutless, narcissistic Internet cult leader whose deformed ego is fed by a great rabble of lickspittle followers and total control of posts and comments. He sounds like he’d be nothing in the real world, struggling to keep a Circle K from being robbed by unarmed women every 15 minutes, but on the Internet, he gets to thump his chest and say, “Look at me! I am strong, Nietzsche Strong!”Joseph L. writes:
In brief, Johnson did not call you a Nazi, he supported another who did and banished others who objected. This is consistent with his practice, in which the defense of a belief, or more properly feeling, consists in outlawing those who disagree with it, or more properly him.LA writes:
By the way, since this whole thing began today with Johnson’s denial that he called me a Nazi, I want to make it clear that in the previous, “Springtime for Hitler,” thread, I never said that Johnson called me a Nazi. I said that he endorsed that view, that he expelled people from his site for opposing that view, and that, by his reasoning, anyone to the right of himself on issues of race and Islam is a neo-Nazi. But I did not say, quote unquote, that Johnson had called me Nazi. The issue, as Joseph L. points out, is not that Johnson called me a Nazi, but that he associated himself with, legitimized, endorsed, and enforced the view that I am a Nazi.Michael P. writes:
“To see what I’m talking about, click on this link to his thread where I and others were called neo-Nazis.”Erich writes:
It is highly unlikely that Johnson will address your detailed argument and offer an actual counter-argument, for he has with similar arrogance and lack of respect for the rules of counter-argument dismissed “Christine” at the Center for Vigilant Freedom website, who wrote a series of essays that form a scrupulously exhaustive defense of Vlaams Belang and Paul Dewinters in the context of her critique of Johnson. Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 17, 2008 12:42 PM | Send Email entry |