Some Quotes on Socialism and Fascism

From:

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_about/nazi

And:

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes.nsf/quotes_about!ReadForm&Count=50&Start=101&RestrictToCategory=fascism

Chiefio: If you poke around a little, you can find a lot more places where Wilson or FDR praised Mussolini:

Franklin D. Roosevelt (about Musollini) , quotes about Fascism:
I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.

Chiefio: I think this one makes Adolf Hitler’s views on Capitalism clear and that he thinks Nazis are Socialists:

Adolf Hitler, quotes about Nazi:
We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.

Adolf Hitler, quotes about Nazi:
Why nationalize industry when you can nationalize the people?

Chiefio: Never trust folks with no vices who think they know whats good for you too:

Heinrich Hoffmann, quotes about Nazi:
Adolf Hitler’s life style is simple. He never drinks alcohol and does not smoke.

Chiefio: Gee, this sounds like someone thinks they are an anti-capitalist socialist:

Joseph Paul Goebbels, quotes about Nazi:
As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods.

Chiefio: How about a little “Living Wage” Policy? Maybe some “public health” issues? Equality of education at the public expense?:

National Socialist Party of Germany (NAZI), quotes about Nazi:
We ask that government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within the confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: … an end to the power of financial interest. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand … the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of the national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our system of public education…. We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents…. The government must undertake the improvement of public health — by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor — by the greatest possible support for all groups concerned with the physical education of youth. [W]e combat the … materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of The Common Good Before the Individual Good.

Chiefio: And way back before all of it we have a somewhat spooky premonition:

Adam Smith, quotes about Fascism:
The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would … assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

Chiefio: Shades of “War on Drugs” and “War on Terrorism” and “Health Care Crisis” and…:

Herbert Hoover, quotes about Nazi:
Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of ’emergency’. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And ’emergency’ became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.

Joseph Sobran, quotes about Fascism:
At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.

Stephen P. Halbrook, quotes about Nazi:
Such questions have never been discussed in scholarly publications because the Nazi laws, policies, and practices have never been adequately documented. The record establishes that a well-meaning liberal republic would enact a gun control act that would later be highly useful to a dictatorship.

Chiefio: How about a nice “Progressive” policy like “Gun Control”:

Adolf Hitler, quotes about Nazi (False):
This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilised nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

Chiefio: Some “collectivist” thoughts:

Adolf Hitler, quotes about Nazi:
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole.

Adolf Hitler, quotes about Nazi:
Society’s needs come before the individual’s needs.

Chiefio: Love of money? Not for a good socialist:

Adolf Hitler, quotes about Nazi:
Gold is not neccesary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state, without an ounce of gold behind it. Anyone who sells above the set prices, let him be marched off to a concentration camp. That’s the bastion of money.

Vance Packard, quotes about Nazi:
The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.

Chiefio: Now, about those “Corporations” that were allowed to exist:

Leonard Peikoff, quotes about Nazi:
Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property—so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

Chiefio: Talk about your “Smoking Nazi!”:

Robert N. Proctor, quotes about Nazi:
Jena by this time was a center of antitobacco activism — mainly through the labors of Karl Astel, director of the new institute [Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research] and president, since the summer of 1939, of the University of Jena. Astel was head of the Thuringia’s office of Racial Affairs and a notorious antisemite and racial hygienist (he had joined the Nazi party and the SS in July of 1930) … Astel was also a militant antismoker and teetolater who once characterized opposition to tobacco as a ‘national socialist duty.’ On May 1, 1941, he banned smoking in all buildings and classrooms of the University of Jena, and the following spring, as head of Thuringia’s Public Health Office, he announced a smoking ban in all regional schools and health offices. Tobacco in his view had to be fought ‘cigar by cigar, cigarette by cigarette, and pack by pack’ — hence his notoriety for snatching cigarettes from the mouth of students who dared to violate his Jena University tobacco ban.

Chiefio: Reminds me of the “mandated volunteer community service” my kids had to do in “public school”…

Bernhard Rust, quotes about Nazi:
Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils… and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.

Chiefio: How about a ban on “Military Style Guns”, where does that lead?:

SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz, quotes about Nazi:
All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately … The SS, SA and Stahlhelm give every respectable German man the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above named organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon … must be regarded as an enemy of the national government.

Chiefio: Some more “Progressive Agenda”:

Karl Marx, quotes about Fascism:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

Chiefio: Birds of a feather:

John F. McManus, quotes about Fascism:
Left has come to represent increasing government control. The extreme leftist typically seeks total government. Working their way toward total government power are the Communists, socialists, fascists, and modern liberals who advocate government solutions for every real or imagined problem.

Chiefio: The “Collective” State:

Benito Mussolini, quotes about Fascism (Questionable):
Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power.

Benito Mussolini, quotes about Fascism:
Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State … Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.

Benito Mussolini, quotes about Fascism:
Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State.

Chiefio: Do what I want, centrally planned, or else:

Benito Mussolini, quotes about Fascism:
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.

Benito Mussolini, quotes about Fascism:
The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.

Benito Mussolini, quotes about Fascism:
Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which diverent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.

Chiefio: Note that here “liberalism” is the traditional ClasiLiberal sort, or Libertarian not the “progressive” that it has come to mean in America (which is actually a flavor of socialist leaning). OK, more ‘collective’ action and some “social goals”:

Alfredo Rocco, quotes about Fascism:
For liberalism, the individual is the end, and society the means. For fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.

Unknown, quotes about Fascism:
The difference between [socialism & fascism] is superficial & purely formal, but it is significant psychologically; it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (& of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, &, therefore, the abolition of private property… Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use.

James A. C. Brown, Fascism quotes:
Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.

Chiefio: Gotta love this one:

Paul Harvey, Fascism quotes:
They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?

Chiefio: I think I like this sorting:

Robert A. Heinlein, Fascism quotes:
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Adolf Hitler, Fascism quotes:
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole.

Adolf Hitler, Fascism quotes:
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.

Some Marxist Views and Where They Go

So I was trawling around for some quotes, and ran into this rather facinating page. No idea who the guy is, nor who the folks are to whom he links, but he’s got a pretty in depth look at the historical connections. I’m going to quote some fairly large chunks, just because I can’t see how to cut them down and preserve the feel for the thing. At any rate, the whole article is “well worth a read” and even spends some time on issues like the Soviets use of the Swastika before the Nazi’s use. Seems Hitler picked up more than just his economic policies from Soviet Russia, but also the emblematic Swastika.

From:

http://knol.google.com/k/hitler-was-a-socialist

I’ll be marking blocks of text wtih “BEGIN QUOTE” and “END QUOTE” as otherwise the indenting levels get too deep.

BEGIN QUOTE:

John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)

“True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt’s: “Give back Alsace and Lorraine”. For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?”

Have a look at the headline quote above and say who wrote it. It is a typical Hitler rant, is it not? Give it to 100 people who know Hitler’s speeches and 100 would identify it as something said by Adolf. The fierce German nationalism and territorial ambition is unmistakeable. And if there is any doubt, have a look at another quote from the same author:

This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand-year reign of freedom.

That settles it, doesn’t it? Who does not know of Hitler’s glorification of military sacrifice and his aim to establish a “thousand-year Reich”?

But neither quote is in fact from Hitler. Both quotes were written by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s co-author (See here and here). So let that be an introduction to the idea that Hitler not only called himself a socialist but that he WAS in fact a socialist by the standards of his day. Ideas that are now condemned as Rightist were in Hitler’s day perfectly normal ideas among Leftists. And if Friedrich Engels was not a Leftist, I do not know who would be.

But the most spectacular aspect of Nazism was surely its antisemitism. And that had a grounding in Marx himself. The following passage is from Marx but it could just as well have been from Hitler:

“Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew — not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time…. We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development — to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed — has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry”.

Note that Marx wanted to “emancipate” (free) mankind from Jewry (“Judentum” in Marx’s original German), just as Hitler did and that the title of Marx’s essay in German was “Zur Judenfrage”, which — while not necessarily derogatory in itself — is nonetheless exactly the same expression (“Jewish question”) that Hitler used in his famous phrase “Endloesung der Judenfrage” (“Final solution of the Jewish question”). And when Marx speaks of the end of Jewry by saying that Jewish identity must necessarily “dissolve” itself, the word he uses in German is “aufloesen”, which is a close relative of Hitler’s word “Endloesung” (“final solution”). So all the most condemned features of Nazism can be traced back to Marx and Engels, right down to the language used. The thinking of Hitler, Marx and Engels differed mainly in emphasis rather than in content. All three were second-rate German intellectuals of their times. Anybody who doubts that practically all Hitler’s ideas were also to be found in Marx & Engels should spend a little time reading the quotations from Marx & Engels archived here http://marxwords.blogspot.com/.

:END QUOTE

I don’t have the time right now to follow up that particularly juicy connection, but that Marx and Engles shared so much more of the Racist element of Nazism is of significance. (Why? As “nationalism” and “racism” are the only two things that really separate the Nazi doctrine from the Soviet one. And if racism was in from the foundation of Marx and Engels, well, it’s a much shorter “connection” to make!)

The Social Agenda

BEGIN QUOTE:

Modern Leftism

Before we answer that question, however, let us look at what the Left and Right in politics consist of at present. Consider this description by Edward Feser of someone who would have been a pretty good Presidential candidate for the modern-day U.S. Democratic party:

He had been something of a bohemian in his youth, and always regarded young people and their idealism as the key to progress and the overcoming of outmoded prejudices. And he was widely admired by the young people of his country, many of whom belonged to organizations devoted to practicing and propagating his teachings. He had a lifelong passion for music, art, and architecture, and was even something of a painter. He rejected what he regarded as petty bourgeois moral hang-ups, and he and his girlfriend “lived together” for years. He counted a number of homosexuals as friends and collaborators, and took the view that a man’s personal morals were none of his business; some scholars of his life believe that he himself may have been homosexual or bisexual. He was ahead of his time where a number of contemporary progressive causes are concerned: he disliked smoking, regarding it as a serious danger to public health, and took steps to combat it; he was a vegetarian and animal lover; he enacted tough gun control laws; and he advocated euthanasia for the incurably ill.

He championed the rights of workers, regarded capitalist society as brutal and unjust, and sought a third way between communism and the free market. In this regard, he and his associates greatly admired the strong steps taken by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to take large-scale economic decision-making out of private hands and put it into those of government planning agencies. His aim was to institute a brand of socialism that avoided the inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet variety, and many former communists found his program highly congenial. He deplored the selfish individualism he took to be endemic to modern Western society, and wanted to replace it with an ethic of self-sacrifice: “As Christ proclaimed ‘love one another’,” he said, “so our call — ‘people’s community,’ ‘public need before private greed,’ ‘communally-minded social consciousness’ — rings out.! This call will echo throughout the world!”

The reference to Christ notwithstanding, he was not personally a Christian, regarding the Catholicism he was baptized into as an irrational superstition. In fact he admired Islam more than Christianity, and he and his policies were highly respected by many of the Muslims of his day. He and his associates had a special distaste for the Catholic Church and, given a choice, preferred modern liberalized Protestantism, taking the view that the best form of Christianity would be one that forsook the traditional other-worldly focus on personal salvation and accommodated itself to the requirements of a program for social justice to be implemented by the state. They also considered the possibility that Christianity might eventually have to be abandoned altogether in favor of a return to paganism, a worldview many of them saw as more humane and truer to the heritage of their people. For he and his associates believed strongly that a people’s ethnic and racial heritage was what mattered most. Some endorsed a kind of cultural relativism according to which what is true or false and right or wrong in some sense depends on one’s ethnic worldview, and especially on what best promotes the well-being of one’s ethnic group

There is surely no doubt that the man Feser describes sounds very much like a mainstream Leftist by current standards. But who is the man concerned? It is a historically accurate description of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was not only a socialist in his own day but he would even be a mainstream socialist in MOST ways today.

:ENDQUOTE

It does sound rather like the typical “Progressive Agenda” of today… But skipping on down:

The Socialist Collective by Any Other Name

BEGIN QUOTE:

(For those who are unaware of it, Von Mises was an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a remarkably prescient economist. He got out of Vienna just hours ahead of the Gestapo. He did therefore have both every reason and every opportunity to be a close observer of Nazism. So let us also read a bit of what he said about the Nazi economy:)

The Nazis did not, as their foreign admirers contend, enforce price control within a market economy. With them price control was only one device within the frame of an all-around system of central planning. In the Nazi economy there was no question of private initiative and free enterprise. All production activities were directed by the Reichswirtschaftsministerium. No enterprise was free to deviate in the conduct of its operations from the orders issued by the government. Price control was only a device in the complex of innumerable decrees and orders regulating the minutest details of every business activity and precisely fixing every individual’s tasks on the one hand and his income and standard of living on the other.

What made it difficult for many people to grasp the very nature of the Nazi economic system was the fact that the Nazis did not expropriate the entrepreneurs and capitalists openly and that they did not adopt the principle of income equality which the Bolshevists espoused in the first years of Soviet rule and discarded only later. Yet the Nazis removed the bourgeois completely from control. Those entrepreneurs who were neither Jewish nor suspect of liberal and pacifist leanings retained their positions in the economic structure. But they were virtually merely salaried civil servants bound to comply unconditionally with the orders of their superiors, the bureaucrats of the Reich and the Nazi party.

:END QUOTE

So you get to keep the corporation in name, but all the planning is from the central government and you don’t have any real say in what you are to do. Not exactly “Free Enterprize”…

BEGIN QUOTE:

And let us listen to Hitler himself on the matter:

“There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will.”

Another quote:

“Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.”

(Quoted in Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, London, T. Butterworth, 1940)
:END QUOTE

So it’s pretty clear that the “ownership” of a corporation was not at all like we think of it now. It’s also quite clear that the goal was a Socialist State, just by a slightly different path.

BEGIN QUOTE:

Further, as a good socialist does, Hitler justified everything he did in the name of “the people” (Das Volk). The Nazi State was, like the Soviet State, all-powerful, and the Nazi party, in good socialist fashion, instituted pervasive supervision of German industry. And of course Hitler and Stalin were initially allies. It was only the Nazi-Soviet pact that enabled Hitler’s conquest of Western Europe. The fuel in the tanks of Hitler’s Panzern as they stormed through France was Soviet fuel.

And a book that was very fashionable worldwide in the ’60s was the 1958 book “The Affluent Society” by influential “liberal” Canadian economist J.K. Galbraith — in which he fulminated about what he saw as our “Private affluence and public squalor”. But Hitler preceded him. Hitler shared with the German Left of his day the slogan: “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz” (Common use before private use). And who preceded Hitler in that? Friedrich Engels at one stage ran a publication called Gemeinnuetziges Wochenblatt (“Common-use Weekly”).
:END QUOTE

So we’ve got the same basic “complaint” from all of the “Leftists”… the “Public Good” needs to come first…

Planned non-Parenthood

But what about that whole “racial purity” and improve people through Eugenics thing? Surely THAT was a uniquely Nazi thing?

BEGIN QUOTE:

And we all know how evil Nazi eugenics were, don’t we? How crazy were their efforts to build up the “master race” through selective breeding of SS men with the best of German women — the “Lebensborn” project? Good Leftists today recoil in horror from all that of course. But who were the great supporters of eugenics in Hitler’s day? They were in fact American Leftists — and eugenics was only one of the ideas that Hitler got from that source. What later came to be known as Fascism was in fact essentially the same as what was known in the USA of the late 19th and early 20th century as “Progressivism”, so Fascism is in fact as much an American invention as a European one. The Europeans carried out fully the ideas that American Leftists invented but could only partially implement. America itself resisted the worst of the Fascist virus but much of Europe did not. The American Left have a lot to answer for. I have outlined the largely Leftist roots of eugenics here http://jonjayray.tripod.com/lefteug2.html and the largely American roots of Fascism here http://jonjayray.tripod.com/amerfasc.html.

So even Hitler’s eugenics were yet another part of Hitler’s LEFTISM! He got his eugenic theories from the Leftists of his day. He was simply being a good Leftist intellectual in subscribing to such theories.

:END QUOTE

For what it’s worth, this aspect of American Progressives was widely known when I was a kid. Seems to have been forgotten lately. “Planned Parenthood” came straight out of the American Eugenics movement.

http://blackgenocide.org/sanger.html

At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the “black” and “yellow” peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.
[…]
While Planned Parenthood’s current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. The eugenic theme figured prominently in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded in 1917. She published such articles as “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (February 1921), “The purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925), “Birth Control: The True Eugenics” (August 1928), and many others.

Yup, that bastion of the Left “A woman’s right to choose” with a little more encouragment if you are poor, black, or otherwise not quite what they liked…

American Progressive Connections

That “jonjay” link in the prior quote has this interesting bit:

BEGIN QUOTE:
And as this article shows, the American “Progressives” of the late 19th and early 20th century were not only Leftists but they were also war-glorifying militarists. Hitler got not only his eugenic ideas from American Leftists but even his ideas about war being a purification of the national spirit etc. And who was it who said this?

“Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.”

Was it Adolf? It sounds very much like either Adolf or Mussolini at the height of their powers but it was in fact said while both Hitler and Mussolini were still in the trenches of World War I and it was said by the President of the United States, the arch-Progressive Woodrow Wilson. See here for that and many other ways (including book-burning) in which Adolf learnt from American leftists. History can be very surprising. Loberfeld’s short history of progressivism has more on its militaristic aspects.

Wilson even foreshadowed Hitler’s racism. Note this quote about his actions in 1912:

“Upon taking power in Washington, Wilson and the many other Southerners he brought into his cabinet were disturbed at the way the federal government went about its own business. One legacy of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy was that Washington’s large black populace had access to federal jobs, and worked with whites in largely integrated circumstances. Wilson’s cabinet put an end to that, bringing Jim Crow to Washington. Wilson allowed various officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments”.

So Wilson actually reversed more tolerant policies put in place by Republicans. Racism was very LEFTIST in Hitler’s day. Leftists like to portray Wilson as a visionary. They neglect to mention that the future he envisioned was a racially segregated one.

Jonah Goldberg has a good summary of the Wilson administration too:

Under Woodrow Wilson, the first American president to embrace the new cult of pragmatism and power that had overtaken “enlightened” thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic (and the first American president to openly disdain the U.S. Constitution), the progressives unleashed a crackdown on freedom that makes the supposed fascism of the McCarthy era and the Bush years seem like a teach-in at Smith College. Wilson established the American Protective League, a group of domestic fascisti charged with crushing dissent, beating “slackers,” and intimidating average Americans. Wilson’s Committee for Public Information was the first modern propaganda ministry. Indeed, according to the late sociologist and intellectual historian Robert Nisbet, the “West’s first real experience with totalitarianism – political absolutism extended into every possible area of culture and society, education, religion, industry, the arts, local community and family included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings – came with the American war state under Wilson.”

And I suppose it is very crass and inconsiderate of me to point out that Wilson began his book: The State. Elements of Historical and Practical Politics: A sketch of institutional History and Administration with a study of Aryan politics. Woody’s book does not appear to be available anywhere online so I have reproduced in an Appendix to this article some extracts from it about Aryans and such matters.

At the risk of appearing to flog a dead horse, I might also point to Koenigsberg’s demonstration that Hitler saw Germany as a living organism that was severely threatened. And where did Hitler get the idea of Germany as a biological organism? He could have got it from various sources but one of the most prominent sources of such thinking was again the very anti-business Woodrow Wilson — who justified his wish to scrap the checks and balances of the American constitution on the grounds that the U.S. government was “not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life… No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live”. And American Leftists still often characterize the constitution as a “living” thing to this day. Like Wilson, they use such language as an excuse for escaping the constraint of law that does not suit them. Hitler would have seen that as perfectly proper!

In fact, the more one reads about the American “Progressives” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the more parallels one finds between them and the Fascists. For instance, particularly prominent on the American Left were the Bellamys. Edward and Francis Bellamy actively promoted what they called “military socialism” and, largely under their influence, loyalty oaths, flag ceremonies, racist preaching and even the straight-armed salute were all common in America long before they were adopted by Mussolini and the Nazis. See here for some details, including remarkable photographs from the period concerned.

:END QUOTE

OK, that’s kind of a heavy load. But the fact is that the “Progressives” advocated basically the same agenda and used many of the same devices as were later adopted by Fascists and Nazis. It isn’t so much that there was a Fascist root to Progressives, as that there is an American Progressive root in Fascism. Reading a little history of Woodrow Wilson can really give you the willies…

Further down the same page,
BEGIN QUOTE:

But to return to Mussolini for a moment: Where do you think he got these ideas in a speech he made in 1933?

“If we are to go forward we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because, without such discipline, no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good”.

It’s mainstream Fascism, isn’t it? Totally submerging the individual into an army that works only for the common good rather than individual good. The trouble is that it was not a speech made by Mussolini. It is an excerpt from the First Inaugural Address of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — great hero of the American Left to this day. So the ideas of the “Progressives” were also the ideas of FDR’s “New Deal”. Leftism has gone under many names but the basic desire to reduce people to an antlike status remains. Read the above quote again if you doubt it. Or read Hegel for that matter (see Appendix 2 below). And see Trifkovic for more detail on the affinities between FDR and Mussolini.

[…]

And it was of course FDR who sent the desperate German Jewish refugees aboard the “St. Louis” back to Germany in 1939 — despite the low level of antisemitism in America at that time.

And that is not the end of the affinities between F.D. Roosevelt and the European Fascists. As Hornberger reminds us:

“Were Hitler’s economic policies in the 1930s, however, significantly different from those of Roosevelt, his counterpart in the United States? On the contrary, there was a striking similarity between FDR’s New Deal and the methods that Hitler used to get Germany out of the Depression. Both FDR and Hitler instituted massive government spending campaigns, including public-works programs, to bring full employment to their countries. In the United States, for example, there was the Hoover Dam. In Germany, there was the national autobahn system.

:END QUOTE

Shades of “Stimulus” and “QE-2″(!)

BEGIN QUOTE:

The Nazis also imposed an extensive system of governmental control over German businesses. Was Roosevelt’s approach any different? Consider FDR’s pride and joy, his National Recovery Act, which was characterized by the infamous Blue Eagle. With the NRA, the U.S. government required entire industries to combine into government-protected cartels, and directed them to fix wages and prices in their respective industries. If a businessman refused to go along, he faced prosecution and punishment, not to mention protest demonstrations from Blue Eagle supporters. (The Supreme Court ultimately declared the NRA unconstitutional.)

Let’s also not forget the important paternalistic elements of Hitler’s national socialism: Social Security, national health care, public schooling, and unemployment compensation. Sound familiar?

Hitler himself showed keen insight into this matter. In his biography Adolf Hitler, John Toland writes, “Hitler had genuine admiration for the decisive manner in which the President had taken over the reins of government. ‘I have sympathy for Mr. Roosevelt,’ he told a correspondent for the New York Times two months later, ‘because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, lobbies and bureaucracy.’ Hitler went on to note that he was the sole leader in Europe who expressed ‘understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt.'”

So again we see European Fascists learning from and admiring the dominant American Leftists of their day. They were brothers in arms, just as Hitler and Stalin were later literally brothers in arms. That brothers sometimes fall out should not prevent us from noting the brotherhood concerned.
:END QUOTE

The more you dig, the more you find that there were far more similarities than differences between all the various “Progressive” and “Socialist” movements of that day. Same agenda. Same approaches. The major difference was that in the USA our limited government of that day prevented a full blown fascist / socialist state from being formed. (Though we are much closer to it today).

To Harvard

Further on down the page, we get to see how Harvard hasn’t changed much…

BEGIN QUOTE:
And the following description of American Progressivism in the early 20th century could just as well have been a description of Fascism:

“Progressive policies embodied an underlying philosophy repugnant to Jeffersonianism. As Ekirch describes this philosophy, “Society in the future would have to be based more and more on an explicit subordination of the individual to a collectivist, or nationalized, political and social order. This change, generally explained as one of progress and reform, was of course also highly important in building up nationalistic sentiment. At the same time, the rising authority and prestige of the state served to weaken the vestiges of internationalism and cosmopolitanism and to intensify the growing imperialistic rivalries.” In their statist cause the progressives, who were now appropriating the name “liberal,” enlisted Social Darwinism, economic determinism, and relativism.

So 20th century Fascism was in fact an American invention, or more precisely an invention of the American Left. Like many American ideas to this day, however, it proved immensely popular in Europe and it was only in Europe that it was put fully into practice. As it does today, American conservatism kept the American Left in some check in the first half of the 20th century so it was only in Europe that their ideas could come into full bloom.

And when those ideas did come into full bloom, America’s “progressive” intelligentsia warmly welcomed them of course. And that great present-day friend of Leftist extremism — Harvard University — was in the lead. Below is just one small extract from the history of the times:

“The Harvard University administration during the 1930s, led by President James Conant, ignored numerous opportunities to take a principled stand against the Hitler regime and the antisemitic outrages it perpetrated, and contributed to Nazi Germany’s efforts to improve its image in the West. The administration’s lack of concern about Nazi antisemitism was shared by many influential Harvard alumni and students. A faculty panel that supervised a mock trial of Hitler in 1934 ruled that Hitler’s anti-Jewish actions were “irrelevant” to the debate. Nazi leaders were warmly welcomed to the Harvard campus and invited to prestigious social events, as the Harvard administration strove to build friendly relations with thoroughly Nazified universities in Germany. By doing so, Harvard’s administration and many of its student leaders offered important encouragement to the Hitler regime as it intensified its persecution of the Jews and strengthened its armed forces…..

Prominent Harvard alumni, student leaders, and some faculty assumed a major role in the friendly welcome accorded the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it visited Boston in 1934, flying the swastika flag. Boston’s Jewish community protested vociferously. President Conant remained silent. Officers and crewmen from the warship were entertained at Harvard, and professors attended a gala reception in Boston where the warship’s captain enthusiastically praised Hitler.

That year, the Harvard administration welcomed a top Nazi official, Ernst Hanfstangl, who was Hitler’s foreign press chief as well as a virulent antisemite, to the campus for his 25th class reunion. The student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, editorialized that the university should award Hanfstangl an honorary degree “as a mark of honor appropriate to his high position in the government of a friendly country.” The joyous reception Hanfstangl received on campus was interrupted when a local rabbi confronted him and demanded to know what Hanfstangl had meant when he recently remarked that “everything would soon be settled for the Jews in Germany.” The rabbi cried out, “My people want to know . . . does it mean extermination?” Hanfstangl replied that he “[could] not discuss that. I am on vacation. I am with my old friends.” The Nazi official proceeded to President Conant’s house for tea.

Anti-Nazi activists opposed Hanfstangl’s visit. Some put up posters in Harvard Yard, only to have the Harvard police tear them down. Others held a rally in Harvard Square. Seven demonstrators who tried to speak at the rally were arrested, and sentenced to six months at hard labor. Conant called the demonstration “very ridiculous.”

Gotta love those Harvard Progressives…

And much much more…

Subscribe to feed