Michael, I can see liberals saying that it is you and not Griffin that is semantically distorting words. By labeling our predecessors from the interwar period anti-liberal you are ‘rescuing’ their names and making it less reprehensible to trace our ideological lineage to those evil fascists. However, it’s the other way around; Griffin tars all anti-liberals with the fascist minumum brush in a way to make us radioactive. It’s funny that even Griffin states that the works in his various anthologies delegitimize every liberal assumption; yet as an article of faith Griffin does his best to put all us anti-liberals in his fascist demonology to further perpetuate these disproved tenants!

Two minor points. (1) I think the term “fascist” to characterize the various revolutionary nationalist movements of the interwar period is liberal. There were major differences between Italian Fascism and German National Socialism — one privileging the state, the other the Volk. A better term in my view is “anti-liberalism,” for all the so-called fascist tendencies rejected the liberal distillation of modernity. This, not the Italian model, is what linked these diverse tendencies.

(2) The interesting point you make about the “fascist” attitude to the past I thought particularly pertinent. Conservatives seek to preserve the past, usually for the sake of defending a status quo favoring their self-interest, while anti-liberals see it as a motivation to reject a present that denies them and their people a future. This is what Guillaume Faye called “archeofuturism” and it is basic to what animates Heidegger’s conception of time and being.