If you have not read Fascism was Socialism 2.0, I urge you to do so, as it provides the definition of Fascism used by those who created fascism, and I am going to be building on that article in this one.
One of the most interesting parts of blogging are the personal interactions you end up having with the people who see your articles, and through these interactions, I have come to understand a number of things.
1) Very few people know what fascism is, but everyone hates the word.
2) VERY few Americans know the history of fascism. How many people know, for example, that Spain was a fascist state from 1936-1975? How about Brazil from 1932-1938? How about Portugal from 1933-1974?
3) Most Americans have never heard of Giovani Gentile, or Benedetto Croce – the philosophers who invented fascism.
4) Many Americans want the United States to become a fascist state. Hillary Clinton, for example, told the partners of Goldman Sachs (in a speech later leaked to the public) that her entire public political platform was designed just to get elected, and that she had a completely separate platform to implement once elected. The ‘real’ platform involved running the economy through a partnership between government, corporate America, and our biggest banks. Each part would be co-equal, with her at the head.
Note: The above link to HRC’s speech is actually to an e-mail by John Podesta about the speech, but if you click the ‘attachments’ tab, you can download the speech transcript.
Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Warren wants to create what she calls ‘Accountable Capitalism,’ and her ‘Accountable Capitalism Act’ is a re-creation if FDR’s National Recovery Act, which FDR based on the kind of control Benito Mussolini had over Italy’s economy, before WWII.
FDR, in fact, sent envoys to Mussolini’s Italy, to see what America would have to do to implement Mussolini’s fascism in the United States, believing that fascism would end the depression, and then FDR tried to expand the Supreme Court, so he could stack it with fascism-friendly judges.
The term ‘fascism’ fell out of favor when Hitler invaded Poland, but economic fascism as an idea has never gone away.
Fascism differs from communism in two ways:
1) Fascism is national in scope. Communism is supposed to be global. In Marx’s true vision, government would eventually go away, leaving in its wake a global worker’s paradise. When communism emerged as a non-global entity (in the Soviet Union), proponents began looking for ways to make it work better at the national level. Fascism reflects the change in focus from global to national.
Many modern definitions of the word ‘fascism’ call it ‘ultra-nationalistic,’ and while this was certainly true of Hitler’s Germany, outside of that, fascism was not ultra-nationalistic. Franco’s Spain was not ultra-nationalistic, and nor were the vast majority of fascist leaders across Europe and South America.
Hitler’s version of fascism also differed from most in that his view of ‘nation’ was based on race rather than geography. To Hitler, the German nation consisted of all Germanic people, no matter where they lived, which is very different from Mussolini’s view of Italy as a nation. Some fascist nations, such as Jose Felix Uriburu’s Argentina, were racially diverse. Hitler’s racism was baked into Nazism, but it was not a part of most other fascist states.
2) Fascism leaves paper-ownership of the means of production in private hands. Under communism, the means of production are publicly owned, and profit does not exist. When the Soviet gulag system emerged, as a part of the “worker’s paradise,” followers of Marx took notice that Marxism provided no incentive to produce. The Soviets ended up using the threat of punishment as an incentive system.
Fascism maintains the profit system, relegating business ‘owners’ to a managerial role, with state-defined profit, and state-defined employee pay structures, as incentives to produce – making gulags unnecessary. It was in fact the Soviet use of gulags (something that has been repeated everywhere Marxism has been attempted) that led people like Giovani Gentile to develop fascism as a kind of improvement on Marx’s original ideas.
When Hillary Clinton says that she wants to run the country through a literal board of directors (composed of a partnership between government, big business, and banking, with her at the head), what she is saying is that she will become CEO of the entire American economy. That is fascism.
When Elizabeth Warren says that she is going to create state agencies that will control all corporations with $1 billion (or more) in annual revenue, and that all of these agencies will report to her, she is making herself CEO of the entire American economy. That is fascism.
Many people call Trump a fascist, and I understand why. Trump runs the executive branch like his own personal company, hiring and firing at will, with all the bravado of a reality TV show. Trump acts like he is still on The Apprentice, coming across as boorish, rude, egotistical, and spiteful. Trump may be all of those things. I do not personally know the man, so I have no idea what he is like in person… What I do know is that Trump has a love-hate relationship with the media in which the media portrays Trump as all of those things, and Trump, in turn, ensures that the media never runs out of ammunition, in its quest TO make Trump appear to be all of those things.
Trump, frankly, asks for the media treatment he gets, and then uses it to his political advantage, responding with, “Yeah – well, I get things done, so screw you.”
Yes – it would be great if Trump acted more like a statesman. To those who say Trump is not presidential, I agree. Trump is guilty as charged.
But being un-presidential in behavior is not an impeachable offense, and that is true no matter how badly Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff would like it to be impeachable.
Trump really is the head of the Executive Branch, and while he does have some fascist urges (tweeting, for example, on where GM should build plants), he has done nothing to seize any kind of control over the economy, and has in fact been rolling government control over aspects of the economy back. In other words, Trump limits his CEO-like bossiness to those areas where he, as President in a Constitutional Republic, really does have authority.
Trump’s fascist behavior is just that – behavior. This stands in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s, and Elizabeth Warren’s, fascist policies. Behavior has no force of law. Nobody has ever died from a twitter feed. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, has promised to turn the United States into a fascist state. In her own words: “I have a plan for that.”
People say that Trump attacks the Press, and yes – he has nothing but negative things to say about such news sources as CNN. But other than bad mouthing a bad news source, what has Trump done to reduce the Freedom of the Press?
Nothing.
I can name Democrats still in the Presidential race who want to use the force of law to shut Fox News down. I can name Democrats currently running who want to regulate speech.
If someone denounces Trump for yelling at Jim Acosta; and for bad mouthing CNN on Twitter, and is willing to VOTE FOR someone who would SHUT A NEWS SOURCE DOWN, that person is a hypocrite who WANTS fascism – as long as someone other than Trump is running it.
What I have found is that those yelling ‘Trump is a FASCIST’ the loudest, are often THEMSELVES fascists, who WANT the government to have EXACTLY the power they claim Trump is going to seize, but want want someone other than Trump to wield that power. It is not fascism such people are against; they just hate Trump. If you put Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren in charge, all of a sudden many Democrats are for fascism, even if they do not like the word.
And then there are the Bernie Sanders fans. Bernie Sanders is a little weak when it comes to telling us what he is. He says he is a ‘democratic socialist,’ but thirty years ago he was a communist, and it is unclear exactly what separates the Bernie Sanders of today from the Bernie Sanders of thirty years ago. Mr. “I don’t know why we have thirty brands of deodorant when children are starving in the streets,” is clearly not a free market guy. Mr. “Breadlines – that’s a good thing,” is clearly not a capitalist. But if you call him a communist, he’ll first say he is not one, and then he’ll defend communist theory for a sec, before moving on to anti-capitalist rhetoric.
Bernie seems to be for whatever form of socialism seems to be working, for as long as it is working, and then once it fails he is for something else. Bernie Sanders is a leftist chameleon, whose only real political ambition is control.
Guess what Hitler was doing when he gave his first public political speech? He was a paid propagandist for the Democratic Socialist Government of Bavaria. You read that right – before tripping over the Nazi Party, Hitler was a Democratic Socialist – just like Bernie.
Do you know what the content of that first political speech was? According to Ian Kershaw’s best selling ‘Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris,’ the topic of that speech was how the Jews invented capitalism to destroy the German people, and about how the cure for capitalism was Democratic Socialism, rather than communism.
What was Bavaria’s version of Democratic Socialism? It was what you might call a fascist democracy.
Luckily for the American people, Elizabeth Warren is fading in the Democratic primaries, but in her wake, Bernie Sanders appears poised to win the nomination. At the end of the day, he’s just as bad as she is.
We do not need a collectivist dystopia. We need a return to individual freedom, and the liberty such freedom entails. The only person running for President in 2020 promising anything resembling an expansion of freedom, is Donald Trump.
And that is why Trump will get four more years…