ook Review The Big Lie Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left
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Book Review: The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left
Introduction
The Big Lie is an ambitious and timely book that was written by Dinesh D’Souza. The book has a dual purpose in that it aims at refuting the big lie that cites that Fascism and Nazism are the right-wing while at the same time reinforce the author’s claim that the Republican Party has for a long time remained to be a party for the small government, economic freedom, and political liberty. Summing up, ‘The Big Lie’ is a book that is rich in historical data which demonstrates that Nazism and Fascism belong to the political party left. The central thesis of the book that Nazism and Fascism are primarily responsible for the rise of the American left is not true, and this is backed up by some of the author’s arguments. One such example that refutes the thesis statement is that the author points out that the Nazi’s policies inspired the racist and genocidal policies of the early-American left to which are demonstrated by the Democratic Party.
Chapter One-Return of the Nazis
The chapter talks about the left spinning the big lie that president Trump and the Republicans are racists and Nazis. The chapter opens with Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. In his early career, Freud became aware of a phenomenon which he named transference. According to transference, which refers to the actions of transferring something, it is not just altering the truth, but it is turning the truth on its head which translates into a lie. In the chapter, the author believes that big lies play a major role in the today’s politics and the worst lie being the notion that is propagated by the left that racism and Nazism are inherently right wing, a concept to which even the Republicans have started to believe.
Individuals on the left perceive racism and Nazism as ideologies of the right, with the progressives and Democrats being the historical forces of emancipation, civil rights, and equity. Despite this, the author has a contrasting opinion in that he perceives that America left were the proponents of slavery as well as the extermination of the native Americans and through this, they promoted the concept of racial segregation and as well opposed the civil rights movement. D’Souza also believes that the American left is spreading a big lie by accusing President Trump and the Republican Party of fascism and racism. According to the author, the media, Hollywood, and academia are aiding the American left to spread the big lie.
Chris Hedges, the left wing author claimed that Trump’s presidency was the dress rehearsals for fascism and on the other hand, Ashely Wood, a Hollywood actor declared that Hitler is on the streets in response to Trump’s election. Democrats as well have been responsible for the charge of fascism in that the presidential candidate of the Democrat, Martin O’Malley also accused the Republican presidential candidate Trump of bringing a fascist appeal right into the White House. According to the author, the American left is only playing the Nazi and fascism cards which is an alarmist and sensational way to condemn conservatism. D’Souza wants to demonstrate that Nazism and racism have nothing to do with the Republicans or conservatives as for him, the progressive political left is the real fascists.
Chapter Two-Falsifying History
The chapter tries to explain that President Donald Trump is not a fascist, a racist or a Nazi. According to history, the words right wing and left wing dates back to 1798 during the French Revolution. During this time, the revolutionary partisans sat on the left side of the national assembly while the aisle which is the right-wing rallied to the king’s defense and that’s the reason they were branded conservatives. D’Souza believes that being a conservative has the meaning of defending the principles of the American Revolution which entails political freedom and democracy, economic freedom in the form of capitalism and the freedom of religion and speech. On the other hand, the left wing distrusts the free market system and crave greater federal control.
Fascism, on the other hand, is coined from the Italian word ‘fasci’ which refers to a political agitator in the 20th century Italy. Fascism is a representation of the perception that groups are stronger than individuals which according to the author its equivalent to collectivism. According to the definitions, it is therefore clear that the president is not a Nazi, a fascist or a racist, and this is because the president was endorsed by the white supremacists such as Richard Spencer. However, Trump never endorsed the policies upheld by Spencer, and while the racists approve Trump’s ideas on policies such as immigration, it doesn’t warrant him to be perceived as a racist.
President Trump also has been accused of authoritarianism in the mode of fascist dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler, but for sure, fascism is not the same as authoritarianism. The progressives as well may accuse Trump as a fascist as the Fascism and Nazism were nationalist movements, and they love linking the kind of nationalism to the patriotism of the American right. However, the American nationalism if different as it regards the use of traditional symbols such as the American flag, which is different from the Italian fascists and the Nazis which broke with national traditions. For instance, Hitler introduced the Nazi swastika flag while on the other hand, Mussolini scoffed at the Italian flag. Therefore associating President Donald Trump with Nazism and Fascism is a big lie.
Chapter Three- Mussolini’s Journey
The chapter talks about the origin and development of fascism where it grew out of socialism and is thus a product of the left wing. In the year 1922, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini initiated the first fascist regime, and up to date, we tend to associate fascism with Mussolini and Hitler. Besides, we tend to think of fascism on the right of the political perspective. However, D’Souza argues that this is a big lie as well as according to him, Marxists were the first fascists. Mussolini had irreproachable socialist credentials as he was born into a socialist family and at the age of 21, he was aware of the orthodoxies of Engels and Marx clearly. Mussolini wrote for II Proletario which was a socialist weekly that was published in New York. By the year 1912, Mussolini was on the board of directors of the Italian socialist party, but despite this, he was not just a socialist but as well the leader of the Italian socialist movement.
Adolf Hitler on the other side was also a socialist, and that’s the reason he named it the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. It is therefore clear that Mussolini and Hitler did not switch from socialism to fascism as they were always heading in the same way in that both fascism and socialism had common origins. The rise of fascism was, in fact, a response to Marxism’s failure to materialize as expected as Karl Marx had predicted that as capitalism matured, the working class would inevitably rise against the bourgeois class. The prediction never materialized, but instead, the living conditions for the working class improved and the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were on amiable terms. Therefore, the theoretical basis of Marxism was shaken to its roots, but Mussolini, on the other hand, was quick to realize during the First World War that the working classes had more of an identity that was based on nationality than on a class and therefore, he set about the development of fascism that was anew, practical form of socialism. Thus, according to D’Souza fascism was simply a continuation of socialism which is a legacy of the left.
Chapter Four-A Democratic Party Secret
The chapter talks of the Democrats secrets. The Democrats are responsible for the black slavery as well as the uprooting of the Native Americans. Besides, the Democrats even inspired the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler did not like America’s policy of unrestrained Jewish capitalism but admired American racism. Hitler did not only admire the racist nature of the Democrats but also was inspired to the idea of acquiring new land for the German race, Lebensraum. Native Americans were regarded as alien occupiers of land that belonged to the white settlers, and this was propelled by the Democrat president Andrew Jackson who served the nation between 1829 and 1837. The main reason for branding the Native Americans as aliens is because they needed to solve the Indian problem. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 instituted by Jackson aimed at displacing the Native Americans. The threat of genocide was made overt, and at some point, the Democratic Governor of California Peter Burnet openly declared a war of extermination.
Adolf Hitler saw how the American government had displaced the Native Americans from the north. As a result, D’Souza argues that Hitler was inspired by the actions of the Democrats and thus applied their strategies to the Eastern Europeans, Russians, and the Jews. D’Souza asserts that the Nazi concentration camps are a legacy of the Democratic Party, as slavery was an institution of the Democratic American South while on the other side the Republican Party was founded on the anti-slavery. The author claims that no Republican owned a slave by 1860. According to D’Souza, the Nazi concentration camps and the Democratic plantations were very similar as both systems were based on the ideology of inferiority. The slaves were treated by their masters as animals while the Nazi perceived the Jews as sub-humans. D’Souza thus believed that the work routines for both the Jewish prisoners and the black slaves were similar with both tailored for the groups to toil in groups from dawn to dusk. The concentration camps and the genocide plans were all the dark secrets of the Democratic Party which inspired Hitler.
Chapter Five-The Original Racists
The chapter digs out the original racists. , and the anti-capitalism is inherently anti-Semitic. The Nuremberg law was formed to oppress the German Jews and was instituted in 1934 by the Nazi Ministry of Justice. Heinrich Krieger, a young lawyer, was the prime source of the law and had researched the United States race law at the University of Arkansas, and it is here that he perceived how the Democratic segregation laws could be of use in German against the Jews. The Nazis were fast to realize that the United States segregation and the miscegenation laws could be reformulated for their own gains. The United States segregation laws forbid the interracial marriage and father segregated the accommodation and even the drinking fountains. The Nazis admired how the United States laws led to the creation of two distinct classes of citizens, the first and the second class.
The Democrats were responsible for the enactment and enforcement of the segregation laws in the South and due to this, D’Souza claims that the Democrats inspired the Nuremberg Laws that denied German citizenship to the Jews and as well prohibited the Jews from having sex or intermarrying with the German citizens or the kindred blood. Besides, the author believes that the roots of anti-Semitism were founded on the leftist and anti-capitalism movements as he claims that the Nazi’s anti-Semitism and anti-capitalist ideology of what he coins the Democratic left in America is based on the same course and source.
Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism resulted from anti-capitalism as he saw capitalism and entrepreneurship as the result of the Jewish immorality and according to the author, Marx also perceived that capitalism was a Jewish phenomenon and was of the idea that socialism would free the society from the Jewish capitalism. In the same way as the American Left, Hitler also differentiated between the two types of capitalism; the finance capitalism and productive capitalism, associating the finance capitalism with the swindling Jew. The author argues that the Left’s denouncement of the capitalists as greedy profiteers is similar to the anti-Semitism.
Chapter Six-Disposable People
The chapter talks about the Nazis and compares them to the American progressives. Just like the Nazis, the American progressives are in support of eugenics, and no one makes more representation of the Nazi’s horrors more than Josef Mengele, a physician at the Auschwitz extermination camp. The physician performed gruesome experiments on the children in the camp, conducting electroshock treatments and extracting eyeballs. Josef Mengele was driven by eugenics, a perception that the genetic qualities of the human race could be enhanced through the prevention of the lesser desirable genetic traits from reproducing.
America, on the other hand, had its own version of Josef Mengele named Kermit Gosnell. Beginning in 1979, the American version ran an abortion clinic that was based on western Philadelphia by the name Women’s Medical Society. At the clinic, Gosnell performed late-term abortions, and if the child happened to be born alive, he killed it through a process the coined ‘ensuring fetal demise.’ His method of implementing eugenics was drugging the infants and then stick scissors into their necks to ensure complete demise. The progressive in the present times claims to have no connection to Gosnell, but the author perceives Gosnell’s actions and the pro-choice rhetoric of the American Left as one as they have the same concepts. To D’Souza, the Nazi eugenics and that of Gosnell are closely related and thus linked as one.
In the early 20th century, the American progressives forced some people to get sterilized, a similar concept that was later copied by the Nazis. In the year 1907, there was a law passed in Indiana that forced the sterilization of certain people such as the confirmed imbeciles, criminals, rapists and idiots. However, the sterilization laws were instituted by other 26 states, and over a period of 30 years, more than 65,000 individuals were sterilized against their will. The eugenicist perception has not fully vanished in the United States as the author claims that the Planned Parenthood which is an organization that provides reproductive health care is based on the concepts of eugenics and is bound together with the eugenics movement. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger who defended sterilization, demanding that the prospective parents obtain permits to protect the society against the propagation and the increase of the unfit in the society. It is therefore clear of the author’s perception that the American Left is complicit in the ideology of eugenics as they are in support of the Planned Parenthood and promotes birth control, making them no unique from the Nazi eugenics.
Chapter Seven-American FührersThe chapter talks of the first American Fuhrers, referring Franklin D. Roosevelt as the first American Fuhrer and Woodrow Wilson as a proto-fascist. Roosevelt is a hero of the American Left, and according to the narrative from the book, he should be lauded as he resurrected the American economy after the great depression and as well defeated the Nazi of Germany. According to D’Souza, Roosevelt was the first American Fuhrer, and it was him that set the American Left on a fascist path. Roosevelt did not defeat Hitler, but the Soviet Union did with the help of the American troops that facilitated Hitler’s surrender. D’Souza also thinks that Roosevelt New Deal policies were fascist as they championed state-run capitalism just like the Nazis and the Italian fascists.
Policies such as the National Recovery Act damaged the American free market as they meant that the government could set production targets, prices, wages as well as the working hours across all the industries. The policies were thus depicted as the middle ground between socialism and capitalism, but D’Souza thinks that it was actually the American work ethic and its entrepreneurial skills that recused the nation. Mussolini and Hitler on the other side saw Roosevelt as a fellow dictator and even praised the New Deal for being fascist in tone. However, the author claims that Roosevelt had learned tricks from the American proto-fascist, President Woodrow Wilson as he had served as a Navy secretary under Wilson’s administration and thus he had properly predated fascism. The author insists that Wilson aided in revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan as he arranged a screening of David W. Griffith’s infamous film “The Birth of a Nation” that depicted the clan as the savior of the south. Wilson realized that the film’s message was true and soon after that, new clan chapters were founded in Colorado, Ohio, Oregon, and New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Chapter Eight-Politics of Intimidation
The chapter talks of the politics of intimidation whereby the American Left exercises its intolerance and power through academia, Hollywood and the media. Until now, the Left continues to insist that they won’t stop fighting to get Trump out of office. The progressives won’t relent, and they simply will continue fighting. The author believes the American Left controls the three most powerful institutions in America that include the media, academia, and Hollywood. The political Left has a tight grip on all the humanities as well as the social science departments across America and the institutions constantly weed out conservative professors and at times refusing to hire them. The conservatives have been systematically deprived of a voice in the media as well as the TV and cable networks such as HBO and CNN and some newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post are all leaning to the Left.
D’Souza imagines how a conveyer belt of the Leftist propaganda lies; beginning with academia, they are disseminated by the media and then perpetuated by Hollywood sitcoms and the motion pictures as well. The author perceives the Left as intolerant of all opposing perceptions. The Left’s intolerance is based on the ideas of the progressive intellectual and anti-capitalist Herbert Marcuse, who fled from the Nazi regime in 1993 and responsible for coining the term repressive tolerance. The concept is often summed up by the mantra of no toleration for the intolerant having little or no tolerance against the right wing while allowing toleration for those on the Left. D’Souza perceives this to imply that the Republicans, patriots, conservatives, Christians and the capitalists are not tolerated but as well believes that some organizations such as the Black Lives Matter and anti-fascists groups are tolerated, while in the real sense they should not be tolerated.
Chapter Nine-Denazification
This is the last chapter of the book “The Big Lie.” The chapter is based on the narrative that the conservatives must defeat the fascism of the American Left. It was not possible to bring down Hitler and Mussolini without the outbreak of war, as World War II facilitated the fall of the European fascism. In Germany, the political opposition made the mistake of trying to accommodate Hitler and D’Souza believes that the American conservatives and the Republican Party as well should do their best not to repeat the same mistake. D’Souza is of the idea that various ways can be used to fight the Fascist Left. The first way is that it is important to show everyone that people on the American Left are the real fascists. Besides, America needs a Republican Party that can unite the conservative movement and there is no space for the Fascist Left accommodation.
D’Souza wants the government to be shrunk, and Obamacare has to be done with, the Dodd-Frank Act that holds back banking and investment as well need to be repealed. Besides, only those who are really in need should be eligible for receiving welfare services such as food stamps. The author believes that the Obama administration deliberately inflated the number of welfare recipients as a way to make sure that they rely on the government.
The other option is that the Republicans should pass comprehensive tax reforms such as the corporate tax which should be massively cut and many of the government functions should be privatized as much as possible. In ensuring that the conservative policies are safely aligned, the Supreme Court should be stacked with conservative judges. The judges should be instituted to counter the Democratic judges as there is a need for ideologically-sound Republican judges to be hired. The Republican Party needs to win the votes of the blue-collar workers and other minorities who voted for the Democratic Party in the past for them to really seal the deal. The ultimate solution is that when the protest groups such as Black Lives Matter to which D’Souza believes they are fascist become violent and the amount to riots or domestic terrorism, the police should intervene and enforce the law as required and should not be afraid. The perpetual supremacy of the conservatives at the ballot as well as the defeat of the progressive left will only be guaranteed by a radical, strong agenda that need to be twinned with the ideologically uncompromising judiciary and powerful law enforcement. According to D’Souza, all that is perceived of the Democrats is the big lie.
Reference
D’Souza, D. (2017). The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. Simon and Schuster.
