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Book review: The magic kingdom of Dinesh D'Souza
KneelBeforeHat RetweetedSeems like a perfectly good time to repost @matthewwalther's fantastic review of Dinesh D'Souza's most recent book. You know, the one where he says that the American Left was the intellectual progenitor of Nazism.http://theweek.com/articles/723201/magic-kingdom-dinesh-dsouza …
Link to tweet
The magic kingdom of Dinesh D'Souza
Matthew Walther
September 11, 2017
The 48 hours or so that I spent intermittently reading Dinesh D'Souza's new book have been huge for me, personally speaking. I won't mince words here: The experience was mind-blowing, psychedelic even. I have so many questions. ... Let me be clear. The book, entitled The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, is not polemic or even popular history. It's not even really a book so much as a mystical Weltanschauung in paper form, a vision quest in a magic kingdom, a glimpse into a private world more fascinating and various than Tolkien's — a race odyssey. Learning that, for example, Andrew Jackson and Sen. Benjamin Tillman were committed men of the left, very likely socialists, that Martin Heidegger's Being and Time has had a formative influence on Black Lives Matter and antifa, and that the Nazis devised the Final Solution in response to their childhood reading of various long-forgotten cowboy novelettes — these are the kind of revelations that change a person forever, okay?
These pages are full of staggering truths — e.g., Hitler "is the ultimate racist" — and unassailable conclusions, viz., that Martin O'Malley is one of the "leading lights in the Democratic Party." They actually contain a sentence that begins: "According to a tweet by RuPaul." If I had to pick my single favorite line, I think I would nominate this one: "The topics of Nazism and fascism must be approached with the greatest care, not only because they involve massive suffering and loss of life, but also because the terms themselves have been so promiscuously used and abused in our culture." Pull up the Wikipedia page for "Transference," and you will never wonder again just what lengths D'Souza is willing to go to in search of Freudian analogies and serial killer anecdotes.
Despite what the subtitle seems to suggest, this is not merely a book about how left-wingers in this country have always been secret Nazis. Its other thesis is an even juicier one, namely, that the Nazis were by and large rather ordinary New Deal Democrats. "Nazi DNA," D'Souza explains, "was in the Democratic Party from the very beginning. The Democrats — not the Nazis — are the originators of the politics of hate." Hitler himself would have been "more at home with Democratic President Andrew Jackson or Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun than he would be with, say, Abraham Lincoln." To render it in syllogistic form:
{snip}
D'Souza also has plenty of sound advice for those seeking what he calls a "denazification" of the present-day United States of America. One of the steps he has in mind is lowering taxes; another is to "tighten eligibility requirements so that food stamps only go to the small population of people who are truly needy." Which is not to say that we should neglect the vital role the federal government has to play here. "Why," D'Souza asks, "shouldn't we deploy the IRS, the NSA, and the FBI against the Left in the same way that Obama went after the Tea Party?" Why indeed. "There's even precedent," he reminds us, "for the approach I'm discussing. During the Civil War Lincoln learned that Confederate soldiers were killing captured black federal troops or selling them into slavery rather than treating them as lawful prisoners of war." Lincoln did it first, folks.
....
Matthew Walther
September 11, 2017
The 48 hours or so that I spent intermittently reading Dinesh D'Souza's new book have been huge for me, personally speaking. I won't mince words here: The experience was mind-blowing, psychedelic even. I have so many questions. ... Let me be clear. The book, entitled The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, is not polemic or even popular history. It's not even really a book so much as a mystical Weltanschauung in paper form, a vision quest in a magic kingdom, a glimpse into a private world more fascinating and various than Tolkien's — a race odyssey. Learning that, for example, Andrew Jackson and Sen. Benjamin Tillman were committed men of the left, very likely socialists, that Martin Heidegger's Being and Time has had a formative influence on Black Lives Matter and antifa, and that the Nazis devised the Final Solution in response to their childhood reading of various long-forgotten cowboy novelettes — these are the kind of revelations that change a person forever, okay?
These pages are full of staggering truths — e.g., Hitler "is the ultimate racist" — and unassailable conclusions, viz., that Martin O'Malley is one of the "leading lights in the Democratic Party." They actually contain a sentence that begins: "According to a tweet by RuPaul." If I had to pick my single favorite line, I think I would nominate this one: "The topics of Nazism and fascism must be approached with the greatest care, not only because they involve massive suffering and loss of life, but also because the terms themselves have been so promiscuously used and abused in our culture." Pull up the Wikipedia page for "Transference," and you will never wonder again just what lengths D'Souza is willing to go to in search of Freudian analogies and serial killer anecdotes.
Despite what the subtitle seems to suggest, this is not merely a book about how left-wingers in this country have always been secret Nazis. Its other thesis is an even juicier one, namely, that the Nazis were by and large rather ordinary New Deal Democrats. "Nazi DNA," D'Souza explains, "was in the Democratic Party from the very beginning. The Democrats — not the Nazis — are the originators of the politics of hate." Hitler himself would have been "more at home with Democratic President Andrew Jackson or Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun than he would be with, say, Abraham Lincoln." To render it in syllogistic form:
{snip}
D'Souza also has plenty of sound advice for those seeking what he calls a "denazification" of the present-day United States of America. One of the steps he has in mind is lowering taxes; another is to "tighten eligibility requirements so that food stamps only go to the small population of people who are truly needy." Which is not to say that we should neglect the vital role the federal government has to play here. "Why," D'Souza asks, "shouldn't we deploy the IRS, the NSA, and the FBI against the Left in the same way that Obama went after the Tea Party?" Why indeed. "There's even precedent," he reminds us, "for the approach I'm discussing. During the Civil War Lincoln learned that Confederate soldiers were killing captured black federal troops or selling them into slavery rather than treating them as lawful prisoners of war." Lincoln did it first, folks.
....