Hannah Arendt (from German stamp)I recently read a reminder that—while liberalism certainly has its failings—there is still ample reason to be concerned about right-wing misunderstandings of history and of the dynamics of prejudice and discrimination. A case study is PJ Media’s recent decision to give a platform to Walter Hudson, a Minnesota talk radio host whose self-appointed task is “synthesizing the Judeo-Christian tradition with Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and Tea Party activism”! His latest contribution—“Beating Back the Nazi ‘Sickness’”—starts by berating Bill Clinton for remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s twentieth anniversary celebration in which the former president urged advocates of tolerance to counter Nazi and other forms of racism with the truth that individual human beings are 99.5 percent genetically the same. According to Hudson, Clinton “misdiagnoses the evil of Hitler’s genocidal slave state”: “While racial hatred is certainly repugnant, that alone hardly encapsulates the evil of the Nazis. Misdiagnosing their sickness as merely an attitude toward superficial differences fosters a distorted view of their offense, leaving modern evils out of focus. Hating Jews and other minority groups was not the chief offense of the Nazis. Violating individual rights was. Racial hatred was the repugnant frosting on a vile and poisonous cake. Hating someone on account of their ethnic origins, while certainly distasteful, does not harm the hated individual. Hate alone cannot deprive someone of anything. . . . To understand this better, we need only look closer at the Nazi menace. Racial hatred was not a primary upon which Nazism was built, but a byproduct of the underlying ideology of fascism.” The historical and psychological non sequiturs here are almost too many to unpack. Nazism—rooted in racist German nationalism and millennial-old European Jew-hatred—went deeper than fascism rather than the reverse. Mussolini’s deplorable regime was indeed fascist, but not anti-Semitic—not until 1938 and after when Hitler twisted the Duce’s arm. Franco’s regime was also fascist, but anti-Semitism was a peripheral matter. Mussolini’s regime committed war crimes in Ethiopia, Franco’s did during the Spanish Civil War, but neither contemplated or committed “genocide” in the sense of modern “ethnic cleansing.” There have been many authoritarian regimes on the Right in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, but few sharing totalitarian Nazi Germany’s propensity to wed “statism” to “genocide.” Left-wing totalitarian regimes willing and able to commit genocide ruled Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. On the other hand, Marshal Tito in post-World War II Communist Yugoslavia ruthlessly used state power to prevent ethnically antagonistic Yugoslavs from massacring each other. It is also possible for democratic regimes—constitutionally dedicated to limiting state power to protect the individual—to violate their founding principles and commit genocidal acts. Just ask descendants of the Native Americans of what is now the U.S. Hudson seems to be completely ignorant of Hannah Arendt’s seminal distinction between “totalitarian” regimes of the Right and the Left with a propensity to genocide and “authoritarian” regimes without it. Similarly, his ridiculous notion that “hate” is a harmless emotion—except when linked with state power—completely contradicts every finding of the social sciences since Gordon Allport’s “The Nature of Prejudice” (1954) demonstrated that hateful attitudes fuel harmful actions by individuals and groups. If “hate” is just an emotion, then maybe we should repeal the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it went beyond state action to outlaw discriminatory behavior by individuals that supposedly is merely a reflex of hateful feelings. We would be back to: “No Negroes—or Jews—Need Apply!” At the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, about two thirds of the visitors are young people. It’s too much to expect them to grapple with “Mein Kampf,” but the MOT gives them the opportunity to read an English translation of a 1919 letter—written probably before Hitler ever heard of Mussolini—envisaging the day when Germany would annihilate the Jews. To us at the MOT, tolerance education is not an abstraction or even a history lesson; it’s about how these diverse kids treat each other when they return to LA’s gang- and gun-afflicted neighborhoods. Hatreds do matter—and do need to be defused before they motivate violence. Many on the comments on Hudson’s post—arguing mistakenly that fascism was an ideology with solely a left-wing “socialist” pedigree, and that current-day movements for tolerance education are a “liberal” or “progressive” power grab—are even more troubling and nonsensical than Hudson’s arguments. Whether “Right” or “Left,” authoritarian regimes are inimical to individual liberty, but not necessarily prone to murder people en masse. Genocidally-inclined totalitarian regimes are another matter. With apologies to Ayn Rand, this distinction must not be obscured. And even democratic regimes—whether “statist” or not—need to guard against the destructive potential of hate.