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Posted on 09/30/2007 7:06:48 PM PDT by secretagent
On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan.…America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, she added, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.”
That article isn’t quoted in Three New Deals, a fascinating study by the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. But it underscores his central argument: that there are surprising similarities between the programs of Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.…Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”
snip...
In Rome, Berlin, and D.C., there was an affinity for military metaphors and military structures. Fascists, National Socialists, and New Dealers had all been young during World War I, and they looked back with longing at the experiments in wartime planning. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt summoned the nation: “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. 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. I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army.…I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
The New Deal: Fascism without the Brown Shirts.
The Reid/Pelosi Deal: Fascism without the redeeming virtues.
bttt
The difference is that, for whatever reason and by whatever means, Hitler had pulled Germany out of depression by 34.
BTTT
In "As We go Marching" Flynn details 7 indicators of encroaching Fascism:
"They think that to be a Fascist you must have some sort of shirt uniform, must drill and goose-step, must have a demonstrative salute, must hate the Jews, and believe in dictatorship. Fascism is not the result of dictatorship. Fascism is the consequence of economic jam and dictatorship is the product of Fascism, for Fascism cannot be managed save by a dictator." J.T. Flynn
[Fascism] is a form of social organization
1. In which the government acknowledges no restraint upon its powers-totalitarianism.
2. In which unrestrained government is managed by a dictator-the leadership principle.
3. In which the government is organized to operate the capitalist system and enable it to function under an immense bureaucracy.
4. In which the economic society is organized on the syndicalist model, that is by producing groups formed into craft and professional categories under supervision of the state.
5. In which the government and the syndicalist organizations operate the capitalist society on the planned and autarchical principle.
6. In which the government holds itself responsible to provide the nation with adequate purchasing power by public spending and borrowing.
7. In which militarism is used as a conscious mechanism of government spending and 8. In which imperialism is included as a policy inevitably flowing from militarism well as other elements of facsism.
Sounds like mainland China.
Mussolini's (the former Communist) Fascism and...
Hitler "National Socialist"...
Are not strains of the Political right...
They are strains of the progressive Socialist Left's politics
What deal, and what virtues?
While FDR deepened the Depression. Interesting.
I see similarities with FDR’s America mostly in #s 3 and 6.
It never ceases to amaze me that people are so fooled into believing that FDR was a great president. He was one of the most destructive presidents we ever had!
Dropping dead too soon has that effect.
"Roosevelt may have stretched the Constitution beyond recognition, and he had a taste for planning and power previously unknown in the White House. But he was not a murderous thug."
Solely because JFK also died in office & Teddy didn't make it that far, we had to wait for the Clintons to complete that picture.
(PS "a taste for planning and power previously unknown in the White House" fails to address "controlling and providing permitted talking points to the media" which FDR perfected for the benefit of his political offspring)
All real-world socialism is national socialism, even, or especially, American socialism.
It’s amusing: I always refer to WPA art-deco style architecture as “American Fascist architecture”.
Edward Bellamy, author of the book “Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887.” inspired the national socialist concept for many figures like John Dewey, Edward Weeks and Charles Beard who listed as second in importance to “Das Kapital” as the most important book published after 1885. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was so impressed by Bellamy’s book “Looking Backward” that Roosevelt wrote “Looking Forward” in 1933.
Who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag? How did school children salute it?
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Contrarily, there is not any doubt at all that the Nazis were very strongly nationalistic. In this, they were aberrants regarding socialism (and aberrant in lots of other ways, as socialism invariably is).
yea, that is why i loved this piece, it goes against everything we are taught in public skrewl about Roosevelt. :)
The Roosevelt link is a weak point in the fence of liberal ideology.
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