The Nazi Conscience and Pseudo Fascism

I noticed late last night that Orcinus is doing an article (six parts) about pseudo fascism and when I read it I was amazed at how closely it tied into The Nazi Conscience - basically in the first 80 pages of the book (as far as I am) if you take the words Semitism and Jew and replace them with homosexual, and replace Communist with terrorist, it's absolutely uncanny. And Orcinus' discussion of "real Americans" and the conservative concept of being American resounds with the German concept of Volk. Not to mention, in The Nazi Conscience there's a whole chapter on intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, who didn't fight in the first World War and how they later glorified the fighting as a way of supporting the Nazis, a parallel to "shock and awe" and what Orcinus calls "a kind of beauty to violence" (Hitler himself rails on about it during his trial - that violence can be a form of extreme patriotism). Koonz makes the point that Germans grew into the virulent anti-Semitism they practiced and that it was consciously driven from the top town in some rather disingenuous ways.

Addendum: Ugh, I didn't even mention Michelle Malkin and the whole internment camps thing because it's just so annoying and so over the top, but Eric Muller notes that some people are considering it an issue we should be considering right now.

"...anyone who appreciated Jewish authors was unmanly." (p. 59).

"Thus, while stalwarts clamored for radical action against Jews, newcomers demanded curbs against lawlessness. Confronted by what appeared to be irreconcilably opposed expectations, Nazi leaders exploited a source of power not possessed by earlier revolutionaries: a thoroughly literate citizenry and a technologically advanced media network...Citizens came to believe that they could intuit the "real Hitler"--the one that suited their own outlook--from their experience of a film or a broadcast." (p. 71).

"...allowed followers to glimpse a private life that was carefully constructed for public consumption. In these informal snapshots, Hitler emerged as a regular guy who took pleasure in his followers' adoration, loved his dog, enjoyed the outdoors, and appreciated fast cars." (p. 77).