What a coward you are Michael. Not only do you gloss over a number of well informed points, but then call the person who raised them a perfect example of someone defending something he never defended(!) He didn’t say the ayatollahs are great and kind. But did want to see the historical link and how they came to be, and they did come to power as he inferred, through our throwing out Mossadegh and putting a bloody tyrant back in power. If we didn’t do that (way back before you were a gleam in Mosse’s classroom– thanks to Kermit Roosevelt, and yes as Alain said, because he nationalized their oil) then things might have not turned out this way. That is not apologizing for a current regime, rather intoning saying that until we accept what we did to create the mess, the mess will never go away. Like my Bubby always said “Don’t be a shvuntz” Michael

And you, who studied Italian fascism, and who studied fascism at the seat of someone who knew about it first-hand, should know better, or at least should have some class. By writing your propaganda piece here and pretending that all liberals call 43 “Bushitler” (not just some extreme liberals) and then you use your pedigree and one small work of your hero’s entire body of work to pretend that the current regimes are IslamoFascist. Please. Your professor also wrote tomes about how fascists are really latent homosexuals who have been overtly repressed. Is that the case with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Is he really just a queer who can’t get it on? Did you not see any of what other esteemed historians (William G. Welk, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Michael Parenti…) saw when studying Italian fascism? The Corporatism? The economics of both Nazi Germany and Mussolini? Or wait, maybe some fascisms are only about religion like those Romanian ones you’re talking about (who may or may not have been clerical fascists, perhaps they were just swept up in the pogrom spirit, after all the inquisition wasn’t clerical fascism was it? Or maybe antisemitism = fascism? Is that your new thesis?

One thing i can say about fascism and people using that word, Bubeleh, and that is that when you have one finger pointing at something, you have three pointing right back at yourself. And which nation privatizes the most public services? And who depresses wages? gets rid of unions? We do! (heck even salaam who was a tyrant and killed millions –mostly for us against Iran– had socialized medicine and wouldn’t dump paraplegics on skid row). Was there never an American fascist organization? Were Walt Disney and Henry Ford not fascists? Do the Islamo’s really fit this fascist model?

And what we have seen *since* WWII is that we in North America will support any tyrannical leader, so long as he’s the enemy of our enemy. Why was Rummy so chummy with Saddam when they were fighting Iran? Because he wasn’t yet a tyrant? Or because he was a useful tyrant? How many “right wind dictators” in South and Central America did we support? What happened Sept 11, 1973? Was Pinochet not a tyrant? And who helped him Michael?

So now you are busy pounding the drumbeat to throw the world into total chaos and nuke Iran before they nuke us (well, us, you know, in Ha’Aretz, cause they will never be able to hit us here at home). And you get great power from a word you are proud to be the 1st to mangle and twist. You must be proud. Mosse is dead so he can’t stand up and say that you are turning everything he ever did around. And at one time he must have REALLY liked you Michael, but at this point he would probably say you have become them. Either that or he would have allowed his Zionist sentiments to cloud his rational observation of what WE have become. Somehow (especially reading “German Jews Beyond Judaism”) I doubt the latter. I think he would fight you and make you take his name off your website out of shame that he somehow contributed to your twisted view of history.

One last thing, since it’s arguable that you have never been in Iran. And its arguable that the majority of your readership has also never seen more than the thinnest of clichés about the place. I thought before we liberate these people as well as we liberated the people of Iraq— that it would be nice to at least see some of the faces both of the oppressed Persians and their tyrannical fascists government:

ML:

Neither I nor most of my readership has been to Fascist Italy either. And actually going to a place does not ensure better understanding. Just look at Walter Duranty, who totally misunderstood Stalin while living in Moscow.

You’ve ably confirmed my view that “fascism” has more often than not become an epithet for anything we don’t like. Most of the people who hurl it around, as you do, don’t know much about it. Pinochet was very wicked, but no fascist, any more than Franco. Fascist countries had very well organized trade unions, which you don’t seem to know about.

I do not believe that very many Iranians prefer the mullahs to liberation by us. The invocation of the overthrow of Mossadeqh to justify opposition to any effort by the American Government to support freedom in Iran is just plain nuts.

enough.