Monday, July 30, 2007

Spot the fascist aesthetic

I'm touching up on pt. 3 of the series on O'Reilly and will have it up in an hour or two. In the meantime, you can take a gander at this post from Mark Noonan (who is also a columnist at Townhall, a site which features hordes of Fox News contributors) at Blogs For Bush to get an idea of what hate-mongering actually looks like. I'll wait for you to read it ...

Done reading? See, that's hate and it's downright creepy.

And it's a fascist aesthetic.

Notice that, like O'Reilly, Noonan see two kind of Americans: "traditionals" and "liberals." Yet Noonan is more nakedly bigoted and much more extreme. With Noonan you get the raw form of the same bigotry (i.e."the left" or "s-p"s are threatening the existence of Judeo-Christian America) that O'Reilly peddles.

That post from Noonan becomes particularly disturbing if you consider that he is comparing "liberals" to Europeans, whom he previously identified as becoming "post-human."

Then there's this

Over the past 40 years or so, our society has been ripped to shreds by the cultural left - a body of people who have probably never exceeded 20% of the American population, but who have been very successful at imposing their worldview upon American civilizaiton. The cultural left, of course, views it a bit differently - they don't see a society ripped to pieces, but a society finally freed from the dead hand of religous doctrine and prescriptive morality. For the left, the ability of a person to choose to do whatever he pleases is a precious advancement, to be defended tooth and nail against all comers.

What remains of the Judeo-Christian west (70% of America, 40% of Canada, 20% of Europe) is under double-siege: beset on all sides by Islamo-fascists and leftist who, for varying reasons, want it destroyed. Caught between these two fires, it is often hard to figure out whom to fight first. As for me, I reckon that the external enemy is the greater threat, but in the by and by we must finally confront the domestic left and force it out of power and influence. A healthy society cannot forever endure people at the top who think that morality is a social construct - the problem, of course, being that people who think like that will construct morality in a way most pleasing to themselves at any given moment.
Oh ... I almost forgot. A post on spotting a fascist aesthetic would not be complete without linking to this post from Noonan, in which he tells us that dying in war is "sublime" and that critics of the war in Iraq are "half-men."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're probably right that Noonan's post is fascistic. It certainly has a nasty tone. However, it's also so dumb, and the argumentation is so convoluted, that, it just makes me feel annoyed and hostile. I don't quite get the creepy vibe you describe- I more get that from people like Pat Buchanan, who is actually intelligent.

Hume's Ghost said...

It's creepy to me in that Noonan has somewhat of a fixation with breeding rates and making sure the "Judeo-Christian" tradition doesn't ge outbred by an Other.

Anonymous said...

You know, that makes a lot of sense Hume. I didn't twig to that aspect of the Noonan article. I think you may be more familiar with the thought process of people like Noonan than I am. To me it tends to sound just like bullshit, at least until I start to really read it deeply, and consider that Noonan may be serious.

-atheist