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Prof. Gottfried Replies to Our Review of His Latest Book

Thanks are due to Greg Hood for an outstanding, comprehensive review of my book on antifascism. Mr. Hood wrote an admirably thorough review, which I could not improve on even if I tried. I agree with his implied criticism that I do not fully explain the bizarre relationship between wokeness and corporate capitalism. That troubling connection continues to puzzle me, and I’m not quite sure which is the stronger force in driving it: the fear among the corporate class of irritating BLM, the LGBT lobby, and other woke activists, or the sympathy felt by this class for what I call the “post-Marxist leftist ideology.” Given the firm hold this ideology exercises on the urban and affluent, it seems that both motives may be at work here.

The most compelling aspect for me of Greg’s review is his recognition of the radical nature of my critique of the antifascist scam. I do not view those who scream “fascism” whenever some public figure resists the latest form of thought control to be simply pests or nervous nellies. Nor am I doing something as academic as trying to demonstrate the current inflated use of the F label. I regard the current obsession with a no longer even minimally recognizable fascism to be pathological, and those who incite anxiety about a return to Nazism or even to a more generic fascism to be dangerous totalitarians. Equally frightening has been the spread of this madness outside the US and the introduction of speech codes and steady indoctrination throughout the Western world to contain a phantom danger. A far graver danger is coming from an increasingly repressive Left, which in the name of resisting fascism seeks to destroy all traditional human relations and to abolish our civilization.

Most disturbing is the inability of Western countries to mount any kind of credible resistance to this antifascist hysteria. Attacks on a church, college, or any other traditional institution as fascist, for not doing something as ridiculously irrelevant as providing unisex restrooms, will put the antifascist mobs into a frenzy. This in turn will typically elicit paroxysms of regret from their target. No significant pushback has come from the other side, which is terrified of the antifascists and may even half-believe what the antifascist mob and media present as reality. Since those who push the antifascist narrative are already in power, those they intimidate or influence may no longer see them as a revolutionary force. Actually, the antifascists are engaged in a continuing upheaval, while pretending to oppose a threat that is of their own making.

Paul Gottfried.