The Right Shows Its True Colors?

As an evil Lefty, I occasionally will jokingly refer to my right-winger friends as "fascist pigs." Just a little term of endearment, in the same way that they call me a "pinko commie bastard." All in fun.

That said, I had to laugh this week when I saw that some righties are very upset with the University of Washington for being the site of a memorial to the members of the Lincoln Brigade, Americans who fought against Francisco Franco's Fascist Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). You know the Nationalists -- they were the "bad guys" in the film Pan's Labyrinth; they were the ones who received overt material support from Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany; they were the ones who kept Spain from becoming a democracy until after Franco's death in 1975.

You see, it seems that some of the members of the Lincoln Brigade were members of the Communist Party. Not all, mind you; just some. But that is enough, in the twisted mentality of the Right, to make the memorial "a memorial to Communists." Never mind who truly comprised the Lincoln Brigade, nor who they fought. It is just more proof, in their minds, of how the intellectual and cultural "elites" are against American values, a bunch of commie sympathisers.

I do have to say that I find it rather amusing that the Right now seems to be in agreement with Hitler and Mussolini, just as they were back in the '30s and early '40s. Apparently, Fascism is a belief system whose spectre should be used as a bedtime story to frighten us into action against those pervasive "Islamofascists," but whose realities should be ignored or glossed over when convenient.

It's predictable, but still wonderfully and hilariously ironic.