Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, I came across this little gem of an essay by Spider Robinson published in 1980. It is a defense of science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. It will probably not surprise you to learn that I was a fan of Heinlein in my early teens and sometimes still pick up his work to read on planes. Last year, I may have been the only one in Khartoum reading “The Puppet Masters”…

If you wondering why a recent New York Times book reviewer mistakenly referred to Heinlein as a fascist, read Robinson’s essay. (Okay, to be fair, the reviewer simply thought that “Starship Troopers” was fascist and heaped contumely on Heinlein only by implication.)

By the way, aren’t you tired of the whole “you’re-a-fascist” line? The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist—and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.

Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) “fascists” simply reveals the Left’s nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas. So Bush is a fascist and so is Heinlein…

I was covering a anti-globalization street demonstration in Prague in 2000 for the Wall Street Journal and noticed that the crowd was chanting loudly in Spanish. I asked a demonstrator why this pan-European crowd was reciting Spanish slogans instead of Czech. “Don’t you know it?” he asked. “This is one of the great anti-Fascist chants from the Spanish Civil War.”

In other words, it was from the 1930s.

Even the young communists think like old men, living in a glorious past that has long since passed. This is why they still want to talk about McCarthy, Nixon, Vietnam, “the 1960s,” the minimum wage, the draft, the United Nations…

Their solution for the Iraq war and the Iran A-Bomb? Get France, Britain, Russia and China to agree. In other words, get our World War II allies to join us. Hasn’t the world changed in 60 years? The French and British have given away their empires and forfeited a role in global affairs. They have one aircraft carrier each. Russia is failing state that could not rescue the crew on one of their own submarines. China could play only a bit part in the tsunami relief effort and is actively involved with two members of the axis of evil (Iran and North Korea). Surely India, Japan and Turkey are more important to us now?

The Left’s one relatively new concern is global warming. Yes, they have been threatening an environmental catastrophe since the late 1950s and climate change since the early 1970s, but it, nonetheless, is among their fresher concerns. Still, it is worth pointing out that worrying about the weather is principally a concern of the aged. The rest of us are too busy hurrying to work.

As for New York Times book reviewers, why are they reciting these tired charges? Have they stopped thinking too?