James Kirchik takes a 75-Year-Old Harper’s story, “Who Goes Nazi?” and finds that it often applies word-for-word in the current American context.

Written by Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, the article presents readers with the aforementioned “macabre parlor game” in which she secretly assesses which guests at a random social function might “go Nazi” given the proper political and social conditions. As Thompson keenly observed from her time in Germany, there was no single demographic “type” of Nazi supporter; workers and businessmen and intellectuals and landed gentry all backed Adolf Hitler’s political movement, just as workers and businessmen and intellectuals and landed gentry opposed it. There were even Jews, Thompson wrote, “who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis.” Nazism, Thompson argues, “appeals to a certain type of mind,” not a rigid composite. As such, her article is a timeless analysis of the authoritarian mentality and makes for disturbingly relevant reading today. …

“Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson wrote. “Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.” … These people are lacking “something in them,” a moral code, and their very large numbers are a troubling indicator of a rot in the American soul.

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Liberals like Paul Krugman deny that there is any such thing as Islamofascism.

There isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t.

Raymond Ibrahim, editor of the Al Qaeda Reader, a collection of texts and documents produced by the leaders of the Islamic extremist movement, compares the statements and positions of Al Qaeda to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Ibrahim:

How is The Al Qaeda Reader similar to Mein Kampf? A single sentence from the introduction of the 1999 edition of Mein Kampf, published by Mariner Books, goes a long way in answering this question: “He [Hitler] had made his ultimate goals clear in Mein Kampf as early as 1926: rearmament, the abolition of democracy, territorial expansion, eugenics, the ‘elimination’ of the ‘Jewish threat’” (Mein Kampf, xv).

The Al Qaeda Reader dwells on, if not obsesses over, four of these same five “ultimate goals” of Hitler—everything but eugenics, which is a temporal byproduct of 19th century pseudo-scientific racial theories. But al-Qaeda’s writings certainly dwell on dealing with the “Jewish threat,” overthrowing the “pagan religion” of democracy, both territorial re-conquests (from Palestine to Andalusia) and territorial expansion (to the whole world), as well as rearmament. Even more telling, the “fascistic” tone of Mein Kampf—ridicule and contempt for modernity and peace, praise for heroism and martyrdom, condemnation of promiscuity and lax mores—saturates The Al Qaeda Reader. Indeed, that there are many similarities is best represented by the fact that the German words “mein kampf” translate to “jihad-i”—or, “my jihad”—in Arabic.

Read the whole thing.