Posted on 03/29/2008 5:47:44 AM PDT by moneyrunner
I finally found a supply of Jonah Goldberg’s book “Liberal Fascism” in a mall in Roanoke, Virginia and am halfway through reading it. It is a polemic and well written, but it’s also a good history of Fascism from the beginning of the 20th century to now.
The problem for most people is that for them, history starts with the day they were born. To them, the “New Deal” was how the sainted FDR ended the Great Depression. To have lived through that period was traumatic, and people in their 80s and older will carry the memory to their death. But most of us are taught the lies about FDR and how the Depression really ended.
Jonah refers to the cult of personality that surrounded FDR that was the result of deliberate propaganda of the Roosevelt administration in cahoots with Hollywood. If George Bush tried to do half the things that FDR accomplished during that era, he would have not only had all the Left clamoring for his hide, but most of the Right would be ready to string him up.
The Internet is a wonderful instrument and you can now see Hollywood’s version of Soviet, Nazi German and Fascist Italy’s adulation of the “Leader. FDR”
In the final analysis, the Left is determined to make us all the same, make us march in unison, make us like the same things, repeat the same slogans, go to the same state institutions, the same stores, the same doctors all on the name of “unity” and “change” and “hope.”
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
At least “Peace, land and bread” has some substance to it. It may have been a lie, but it was not so transparent a lie. It was not so obvious an appeal to weak minds as “Change you can believe in.”
Really? and in MA? I was in college in the 80's, and while I did have one econ prof say that the New Deal was part of the problem, for the most part I hear a lot more about what a great president FDR was, and how he saved old people with the safety net of social security, and how he made sure more people didn't starve in the depression.
Oh sure, there was still plenty of praise for the guy, but there were definitely questions about whether price controls, etc. actually worked or not. The overall impression was that government intervention in the economy is a bad idea! Like I said, this was right after Jimmah, so the country had just relearned that lesson recently...and I’m afraid we’re about to do YET AGAIN if Obama gets elected. >:(
Sounds to me like you got the only teacher that probably existed in Ma. that taught the truth. Consider yourself lucky.
bttt
When I was in high school in the late 1960’s in Whittier, Calif., my fellow students and I would argue about the Depression. The liberals would contend that FDR’s New Deal brought it to a close, while we conservatives argued that it was WWII that turned the economy around (can you imagine such a converstion on a high school campus today?)
I currently believe that the downsizing of the Federal Government, instigated by the 78th, 79th, and 80th Congresses, are what really brought the Depression to a close.
What the “New Deal” meant:
The nationalization of agriculture, which eventually wiped out most of our small family farms.
The WPA, the Works Progress Administration. Touted as a jobs program, it gave local Democrat party apparatchiks control over federal largesse. If you wanted work, you had to swear loyalty to the party and obey your zampolit political officer.
Group or herd action. Socialists believe that what is done doesn’t matter as long as everyone does it. Nothing excites socialists as much as seeing hundreds of people exercise at the same time, eat at the same time, and sleep at the same time. This is why they love the *idea* of a military and civilian draft, even if they hate the military. Uniformity and social experimentation are heavenly to them, and why they have long inflicted their experiments on the military.
At the same time, individuality, individual failure and individual success, are seen by socialists as “anti-social” and to be discouraged. Again, it does not matter if the group succeeds or fails, as long as it does so as a group.
Heroes must be torn down, and the worst of the failures uplifted, not for their detriment or benefit, but because it makes them “stand out” as *different*. Mediocrity is king.
And hypocrisy is queen.
The New Deal had nothing to do with freedom, and everything to do with petty control.
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