← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 19265 | Posts: 21 | Started: 2005-07-24
2005-07-24 12:27 | User Profile
[I]I do not necessarily agree with everything in this article, but I found it thought-stimulating and I'd like to hear some comments on the issue:[/I]
[url]http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/10/279251.html[/url]
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[SIZE=6]Fascism and Socialism [/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][B]David Ramsay Steele | 21.10.2003 03:15 [/B] [/SIZE]
[I]How can a movement which epitomizes the 'extreme right' be so strongly rooted in the extreme left? What was going on in the minds of dedicated socialist militants to turn them into equally dedicated Fascist militants?[/I]
Soon after he arrived in Switzerland in 1902, 18 years old and looking for work, Benito Mussolini was starving and penniless. All he had in his pockets was a cheap nickel medallion of Karl Marx.
Following a spell of vagrancy, Mussolini found a job as a bricklayer and union organizer in the city of Lausanne. Quickly achieving fame as an agitator among the Italian migratory laborers, he was referred to by a local Italian-language newspaper as "the great duce [leader] of the Italian socialists." He read voraciously, learned several foreign languages, (2) and sat in on Pareto's lectures at the university.
The great duce's fame was so far purely parochial. Upon his return to Italy, young Benito was an undistinguished member of the Socialist Party. He began to edit his own little paper, La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle), ferociously anti-capitalist, anti-militarist, and anti-Catholic. He took seriously Marx's dictum that the working class has no country, and vigorously opposed the Italian military intervention in Libya. Jailed several times for involvement in strikes and anti-war protests, he became something of a leftist hero. Before turning 30, Mussolini was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, and made editor of its daily paper, Avanti! The paper's circulation and Mussolini's personal popularity grew by leaps and bounds.
Mussolini's election to the Executive was part of the capture of control of the Socialist Party by the hard-line Marxist left, with the expulsion from the Party of those deputies (members of parliament) considered too conciliatory to the bourgeoisie. The shift in Socialist Party control was greeted with delight by Lenin and other revolutionaries throughout the world.
From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.
In 1913, while still editor of Avanti!, he began to publish and edit his own journal, Utopia, a forum for controversial discussion among leftwing socialists. Like many such socialist journals founded in hope, it aimed to create a highly-educated cadre of revolutionaries, purged of dogmatic illusions, ready to seize the moment. Two of those who collaborated with Mussolini on Utopia would go on to help found the Italian Communist Party and one to help found the German Communist Party. (3) Others, with Mussolini, would found the Fascist movement.
The First World War began in August 1914 without Italian involvement. Should Italy join Britain and France against Germany and Austria, or stay out of the war? (4) All the top leaders and intellectuals of the Socialist Party, Mussolini among them, were opposed to Italian participation.
In October and November 1914, Mussolini switched to a pro-war position. He resigned as editor of Avanti!, joined with pro-war leftists outside the Socialist Party, and launched a new pro-war socialist paper, Il Popolo d'Italia (People of Italy). (5) To the Socialist Party leadership, this was a great betrayal, a sell-out to the whoremasters of the bourgeoisie, and Mussolini was expelled from the Party. It was as scandalous as though, 50 years later, Guevara had announced that he was off to Vietnam, to help defend the South against North Vietnamese aggression.
Italy entered the war in May 1915, and Mussolini enlisted. In 1917 he was seriously wounded and hospitalized, emerging from the war the most popular of the pro-war socialists, a leader without a movement. Post-war Italy was hag-ridden by civil strife and political violence. Sensing a revolutionary situation in the wake of Russia's Bolshevik coup, the left organized strikes, factory occupations, riots, and political killings. Socialists often beat up and sometimes killed soldiers returning home, just because they had fought in the war. Assaulting political opponents and wrecking their property became an everyday occurrence.
Mussolini and a group of adherents launched the Fascist movement (6) in 1919. The initiators were mostly men of the left: revolutionary syndicalists and former Marxists. (7) They took with them some non-socialist nationalists and futurists, and recruited heavily among soldiers returning from the war, so that the bulk of rank-and-file Fascists had no leftwing background. The Fascists adopted the black shirts (8) of the anarchists and Giovinezza (Youth), the song of the front-line soldiers.
Apart from its ardent nationalism and pro-war foreign policy, the Fascist program was a mixture of radical left, moderate left, democratic, and liberal measures, and for more than a year the new movement was not notably more violent than other socialist groupings. (9) However, Fascists came into conflict with Socialist Party members and in 1920 formed a militia, the squadre (squads). Including many patriotic veterans, the squads were more efficient at arson and terror tactics than the violently disposed but bumbling Marxists, and often had the tacit support of the police and army. By 1921 Fascists had the upper hand in physical combat with their rivals of the left.
The democratic and liberal elements in Fascist preaching rapidly diminished and in 1922 Mussolini declared that "The world is turning to the right." The Socialists, who controlled the unions, called a general strike. Marching into some of the major cities, blackshirt squads quickly and forcibly suppressed the strike, and most Italians heaved a sigh of relief. This gave the blackshirts the idea of marching on Rome to seize power. As they publicly gathered for the great march, the government decided to avert possible civil war by bringing Mussolini into office; the King "begged" Mussolini to become Prime Minister, with emergency powers. Instead of a desperate uprising, the March on Rome was the triumphant celebration of a legal transfer of authority.
The youngest prime minister in Italian history, Mussolini was an adroit and indefatigable fixer, a formidable wheeler and dealer in a constitutional monarchy which did not become an outright and permanent dictatorship until December 1925, and even then retained elements of unstable pluralism requiring fancy footwork. He became world-renowned as a political miracle worker. Mussolini made the trains run on time, closed down the Mafia, drained the Pontine marshes, and solved the tricky Roman Question, finally settling the political status of the Pope.
Mussolini was showered with accolades from sundry quarters. Winston Churchill called him "the greatest living legislator." Cole Porter gave him a terrific plug in a hit song. Sigmund Freud sent him an autographed copy of one of his books, inscribed to "the Hero of Culture." (10) The more taciturn Stalin supplied Mussolini with the plans of the May Day parades in Red Square, to help him polish up his Fascist pageants.
The rest of il Duce's career is now more familiar. He conquered Ethiopia, made a Pact of Steel with Germany, introduced anti-Jewish measures in 1938, (11) came into the war as Hitler's very junior partner, tried to strike out on his own by invading the Balkans, had to be bailed out by Hitler, was driven back by the Allies, and then deposed by the Fascist Great Council, rescued from imprisonment by SS troops in one of the most brilliant commando operations of the war, installed as head of a new "Italian Social Republic," and killed by Communist partisans in April 1945.
Given what most people today think they know about Fascism, this bare recital of facts (12) is a mystery story. How can a movement which epitomizes the extreme right be so strongly rooted in the extreme left? What was going on in the minds of dedicated socialist militants to turn them into equally dedicated Fascist militants?
[SIZE=4]What They Told Us about Fascism [/SIZE]
In the 1930s, the perception of "fascism" (13) in the English-speaking world morphed from an exotic, even chic, Italian novelty (14) into an all-purpose symbol of evil. Under the influence of leftist writers, a view of fascism was disseminated which has remained dominant among intellectuals until today. It goes as follows:
Fascism is capitalism with the mask off. It's a tool of Big Business, which rules through democracy until it feels mortally threatened, then unleashes fascism. Mussolini and Hitler were put into power by Big Business, because Big Business was challenged by the revolutionary working class. (15) We naturally have to explain, then, how fascism can be a mass movement, and one that is neither led nor organized by Big Business. The explanation is that Fascism does it by fiendishly clever use of ritual and symbol. Fascism as an intellectual doctrine is empty of serious content, or alternatively, its content is an incoherent hodge-podge. Fascism's appeal is a matter of emotions rather than ideas. It relies on hymn-singing, flag-waving, and other mummery, which are nothing more than irrational devices employed by the Fascist leaders who have been paid by Big Business to manipulate the masses.
As Marxists used to say, fascism "appeals to the basest instincts," implying that leftists were at a disadvantage because they could appeal only to noble instincts like envy of the rich. Since it is irrational, fascism is sadistic, nationalist, and racist by nature. Leftist regimes are also invariably sadistic, nationalist, and racist, but that's because of regrettable mistakes or pressure of difficult circumstances. Leftists want what's best but keep meeting unexpected setbacks, whereas fascists have chosen to commit evil.
More broadly, fascism may be defined as any totalitarian regime which does not aim at the nationalization of industry but preserves at least nominal private property. The term can even be extended to any dictatorship that has become unfashionable among intellectuals. (16) When the Soviet Union and People's China had a falling out in the 1960s, they each promptly discovered that the other fraternal socialist country was not merely capitalist but "fascist." At the most vulgar level, "fascist" is a handy swear-word for such hated figures as Rush Limbaugh or John Ashcroft who, whatever their faults, are as remote from historical Fascism as anyone in public life today.
The consequence of 70 years of indoctrination with a particular leftist view of fascism is that Fascism is now a puzzle. We know how leftists in the 1920s and 1930s thought because we knew people in college whose thinking was almost identical, and because we have read such writers as Sartre, Hemingway, and Orwell.
But what were Fascists thinking?
[SIZE=4]Some Who Became Fascists [/SIZE]
Robert Michels was a German Marxist disillusioned with the Social Democrats. He became a revolutionary syndicalist. In 1911 he wrote Political Parties, a brilliant analytic work, (17) demonstrating the impossibility of "participatory democracy"--a phrase that was not to be coined for half a century, but which accurately captures the early Marxist vision of socialist administration. (18) Later he became an Italian (changing "Robert" to "Roberto") and one of the leading Fascist theoreticians.
Hendrik de Man was the leading Belgian socialist of his day and recognized as one of the two or three most outstanding socialist intellects in Europe--many in the 1930s believed him to be the most important socialist theoretician since Marx. He is the most prominent of the numerous Western European Marxists who wrestled their way from Marxism to Fascism or National Socialism in the interwar years. In more than a dozen thoughtful books from The Remaking of a Mind (1919), via The Socialist Idea (1933), to Après Coup (1941) de Man left a detailed account of the theoretical odyssey which led him, by 1940, to acclaim the Nazi subjugation of Europe as "a deliverance." His journey began, as such journeys so often did, with the conviction that Marxism needed to be revised along "idealist" and psychological lines. (19)
Two avant-garde artistic movements which contributed to the Fascist worldview were Futurism and Vorticism. Futurism was the brainchild of Filippo Marinetti, who eventually lost his life in the service of Mussolini's regime. You can get some idea of the Futurist pictorial style from the credits for the Poirot TV series. Its style of poetry was a defining influence on Mayakovsky. Futurist arts activities were permitted for some years in the Soviet Union. Futurism held that modern machines were more beautiful than classical sculptures. It lauded the esthetic value of speed, intensity, modern machinery, and modern war.
Vorticism was a somewhat milder variant of Futurism, associated with Ezra Pound and the painter and novelist Wyndham Lewis, an American and a Canadian who transplanted to London. Pound became a Fascist, moved to Italy, and was later found mentally ill and incarcerated by the occupying Americans. The symptoms of his illness were his Fascist beliefs. He was later released, and chose to move back to Italy in 1958, an unreprentant Fascist.
In 1939 the avowed fascist Wyndham Lewis retracted his earlier praise for Hitler, but never renounced his basically fascist political worldview. Lewis was, like George Bernard Shaw, one of those intellectuals of the 1930s who admired Fascism and Communism about equally, praising them both while insisting on their similarity.
Fascism must have been a set of ideas which inspired educated individuals who thought of themselves as extremely up-to-date. But what were those ideas?
[SIZE=4]Five Facts about Fascism [/SIZE]
Over the last 30 years, scholarship has gradually begun to bring us a more accurate appreciation of what Fascism was. (20) The picture that emerges from ongoing research into the origins of Fascism is not yet entirely clear, but it's clear enough to show that the truth cannot be reconciled with the conventional view. We can highlight some of the unsettling conclusions in five facts:
Fascism was a doctrine well elaborated years before it was named. The core of the Fascist movement launched officially in the Piazza San Sepolcro on 23rd March 1919 was an intellectual and organizational tradition called "national syndicalism."
As an intellectual edifice, Fascism was mostly in place by about 1910. Historically, the taproot of Fascism lies in the 1890s--in the "Crisis of Marxism" and in the interaction of nineteenth-century revolutionary socialism with fin de siècle anti-rationalism and anti-liberalism.
Fascism changed dramatically between 1919 and 1922, and again changed dramatically after 1922. This is what we expect of any ideological movement which comes close to power and then attains it. Bolshevism (renamed Communism in 1920) also changed dramatically, several times over.
Many of the older treatments of Fascism are misleading because they cobble together Fascist pronouncements, almost entirely from after 1922, reflecting the pressures on a broad and flexible political movement solidifying its rule by compromises, and suppose that by this method they can isolate the character and motivation of Fascist ideology. It is as if we were to reconstruct the ideas of Bolshevism by collecting the pronouncements of the Soviet government in 1943, which would lead us to conclude that Marxism owed a lot to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.
Fascism was a movement with its roots primarily in the left. Its leaders and initiators were secular-minded, highly progressive intellectuals, hard-headed haters of existing society and especially of its most bourgeois aspects.
There were also non-leftist currents which fed into Fascism; the most prominent was the nationalism of Enrico Corradini. This anti-liberal, anti-democratic movement was preoccupied with building Italy's strength by accelerated industrialization. Though it was considered rightwing at the time, Corradini called himself a socialist, and similar movements in the Third World would later be warmly supported by the left.
Fascism was intellectually sophisticated. Fascist theory was more subtle and more carefully thought out than Communist doctrine. As with Communism, there was a distinction between the theory itself and the "line" designed for a broad public. Fascists drew upon such thinkers as Henri Bergson, William James, Gabriel Tarde, Ludwig Gumplowicz, Vilfredo Pareto, Gustave Le Bon, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Filippo Marinetti, A.O. Olivetti, Sergio Panunzio, and Giovanni Gentile.
Here we should note a difference between Marxism and Fascism. The leader of a Marxist political movement is always considered by his followers to be a master of theory and a theoretical innovator on the scale of Copernicus. Fascists were less prone to any such delusion. Mussolini was more widely-read than Lenin and a better writer, but Fascist intellectuals did not consider him a major contributor to the body of Fascist theory, more a leader of genius who could distil theory into action.
Fascists were radical modernizers. By temperament they were neither conservative nor reactionary. Fascists despised the status quo and were not attracted by a return to bygone conditions. Even in power, despite all its adaptations to the requirements of the immediate situation, and despite its incorporation of more conservative social elements, Fascism remained a conscious force for modernization. (21)
[SIZE=4]Two Revisions of Marxism [/SIZE]
Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a revision which developed in successive stages, so that these Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as anti-liberal revolutionaries.
The Crisis of Marxism occurred in the 1890s. Marxist intellectuals could claim to speak for mass socialist movements across continental Europe, yet it became clear in those years that Marxism had survived into a world which Marx had believed could not possibly exist. The workers were becoming richer, the working class was fragmented into sections with different interests, technological advance was accelerating rather than meeting a roadblock, the "rate of profit" was not falling, the number of wealthy investors ("magnates of capital") was not falling but increasing, industrial concentration was not increasing, (22) and in all countries the workers were putting their country above their class.
In high theory, too, the hollowness of Marxism was being exposed. The long-awaited publication of Volume III of Marx's Capital in 1894 revealed that Marx simply had no serious solution to the "great contradiction" between Volumes I-II and the real behavior of prices. Böhm-Bawerk's devastating critiques of Marxian economics (1884 and 1896) were widely read and discussed.
The Crisis of Marxism gave birth to the Revisionism of Eduard Bernstein, which concluded, in effect, that the goal of revolution should be given up, in favor of piecemeal reforms within capitalism. (23) This held no allure for men of the hard left who rejected existing society, deeming it too loathsome to be reformed. Revisionists also began to attack the fundamental Marxist doctrine of historical materialism--the theory that a society's organization of production decides the character of all other social phenomena, including ideas.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, leftists who wanted to be as far left as they could possibly be became syndicalists, preaching the general strike as the way to demonstrate the workers' power and overthrow the bourgeois order. Syndicalist activity erupted across the world, even in Britain and the United States. Promotion of the general strike was a way of defying capitalism and at the same time defying those socialists who wanted to use electoral methods to negotiate reforms of the system.
Syndicalists began as uncompromising Marxists, but like Revisionists, they acknowledged that key tenets of Marxism had been refuted by the development of modern society. Most syndicalists came to accept much of Bernstein's argument against traditional Marxism, but remained committed to the total rejection, rather than democratic reform, of existing society. They therefore called themselves "revolutionary revisionists." They favored the "idealist revision of Marx," meaning that they believed in a more independent role for ideas in social evolution that that allowed by Marxist theory.
[SIZE=4]Practical Anti-Rationalism [/SIZE]
In setting out to revise Marxism, syndicalists were most strongly motivated by the desire to be effective revolutionaries, not to tilt at windmills but to achieve a realistic understanding of the way the world works. In criticizing and re-evaluating their own Marxist beliefs, however, they naturally drew upon the intellectual fashions of the day, upon ideas that were in the air during this period known as the fin de siècle. The most important cluster of such ideas is "anti-rationalism."
Many forms of anti-rationalism proliferated throughout the nineteenth century. The kind of anti-rationalism which most influenced pre-fascists was not primarily the view that something other than reason should be employed to decide factual questions (epistemological anti-rationalism). It was rather the view that, as a matter of sober recognition of reality, humans are not solely or even chiefly motivated by rational calculation but more by intuitive "myths" (practical anti-rationalism). Therefore, if you want to understand and influence people's behavior, you had better acknowledge that they are not primarily self-interested, rational calculators; they are gripped and moved by myths. (24)
Paris was the fashion center of the intellectual world, dictating the rise and fall of ideological hemlines. Here, anti-rationalism was associated with the philosophy of Henri Bergson, William James's Pragmatism from across the Atlantic, and the social-psychological arguments of Gustave Le Bon. Such ideas were seen as valuing action more highly than cogitation and as demonstrating that modern society (including the established socialist movement) was too rationalistic and too materialistic. Bergson and James were also read, however, as contending that humans did not work with an objectively existing reality, but created reality by imposing their own will upon the world, a claim that was also gleaned (rightly or wrongly) from Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. French intellectuals turned against Descartes, the rationalist, and rehabilitated Pascal, the defender of faith. In the same spirit, Italian intellectuals rediscovered Vico.
Practical anti-rationalism entered pre-Fascism through Georges Sorel (25) and his theory of the "myth." This influential socialist writer began as an orthodox Marxist. An extreme leftist, he naturally became a syndicalist, and soon the best-known syndicalist theoretician. Sorel then moved to defending Marx's theory of the class struggle in a new way--no longer as a scientific theory, but instead as a "myth", an understanding of the world and the future which moves men to action. When he began to abandon Marxism, both because of its theoretical failures and because of its excessive "materialism," he looked for an alternative myth. Experience of current and recent events showed that workers had little interest in the class struggle but were prone to patriotic sentiment. By degrees, Sorel shifted his position, until at the end of his life he became nationalistic and anti-semitic. (26) He died in 1922, hopeful about Lenin and more cautiously hopeful about Mussolini.
A general trend throughout revolutionary socialism from 1890 to 1914 was that the most revolutionary elements laid an increasing stress upon leadership, and downplayed the autonomous role of the toiling masses. This elitism was a natural outcome of the revolutionaries' ardent wish to have revolution and the stubborn disinclination of the working class to become revolutionary. (27) Workers were instinctive reformists: they wanted a fair shake within capitalism and nothing more. Since the workers did not look as if they would ever desire a revolution, the small group of conscious revolutionaries would have to play a more decisive role than Marx had imagined. That was the conclusion of Lenin in 1902. (28) It was the conclusion of Sorel. And it was the conclusion of the syndicalist Giuseppe Prezzolini whose works in the century's first decade Mussolini reviewed admiringly. (29)
The leadership theme was reinforced by the theoretical writings of, Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, especially Pareto's theory of the Circulation of Elites. All these arguments emphasized the vital role of active minorities and the futility of expecting that the masses would ever, left to themselves, accomplish anything. Further corroboration came from Le Bon's sensational best-seller of 1895--it would remain perpetually in print in a dozen languages--The Psychology of Crowds, which analyzed the "irrational" behavior of humans in groups and drew attention to the group's proclivity to place itself in the hands of a strong leader, who could control the group as long as he appealed to certain primitive or basic beliefs. (30)
The initiators of Fascism saw anti-rationalism as high-tech. It went with their fast cars and airplanes. Fascist anti-rationalism, like psychoanalysis, conceives of itself as a practical science which can channel elemental human drives in a useful direction.
[SIZE=4]A Marxist Heresy? [/SIZE]
Some people have reacted to Fascism by saying that it's just the same as socialism. In part, this arises from the fact that "fascism" is a word used loosely to denote all the non-Communist dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s, and by extension to refer to the most powerful and horrible of these governments, that of German National Socialism.
The Nazis never claimed to be Fascists, but they did continually claim to be socialists, whereas Fascism, after 1921, repudiated socialism by name. Although Fascism had some influence on the National Socialist German Workers' Party, other influences were greater, notably Communism and German nationalism.
A. James Gregor has argued that Fascism is a Marxist heresy, (31) a claim that has to be handled with care. Marxism is a doctrine whose main tenets can be listed precisely: class struggle, historical materialism, surplus-value, nationalization of the means of production, and so forth. Nearly all of those tenets were explicitly repudiated by the founders of Fascism, and these repudiations of Marxism largely define Fascism. Yet however paradoxical it may seem, there is a close ideological relationship between Marxism and Fascism. We may compare this with the relationship between, say, Christianity and Unitarianism. Unitarianism repudiates all the distinctive tenets of Christianity, yet is still clearly an offshoot of Christianity, preserving an affinity with its parental stem.
In power, the actual institutions of Fascism and Communism tended to converge. In practice, the Fascist and National Socialist regimes increasingly tended to conform to what Mises calls "the German pattern of Socialism." (32) Intellectually, Fascists differed from Communists in that they had to a large extent thought out what they would do, and they then proceeded to do it, whereas Communists were like hypnotic subjects, doing one thing and rationalizing it in terms of a completely different and altogether impossible thing.
Fascists preached the accelerated development of a backward country. Communists continued to employ the Marxist rhetoric of world socialist revolution in the most advanced countries, but this was all a ritual incantation to consecrate their attempt to accelerate the development of a backward country. Fascists deliberately turned to nationalism as a potent myth. Communists defended Russian nationalism and imperialism while protesting that their sacred motherland was an internationalist workers' state. Fascists proclaimed the end of democracy. Communists abolished democracy and called their dictatorship democracy. Fascists argued that equality was impossible and hierarchy ineluctable. Communists imposed a new hierarchy, shot anyone who advocated actual equality, but never ceased to babble on about the equalitarian future they were "building". Fascists did with their eyes open what Communists did with their eyes shut. This is the truth concealed in the conventional formula that Communists were well-intentioned and Fascists evil-intentioned.
[SIZE=4]Disappointed Revolutionaries [/SIZE]
Though they respected "the irrational" as a reality, the initiators of Fascism were not themselves swayed by wilfully irrational considerations. (33) They were not superstitious. Mussolini in 1929, when he met with Cardinal Gasparri at the Lateran Palace, was no more a believing Catholic than Mussolini the violently anti-Catholic polemicist of the pre-war years, (34) but he had learned that in his chosen career as a radical modernizing politician, it was a waste of time to bang his head against the brick wall of institutionalized faith.
Leftists often imagine that Fascists were afraid of a revolutionary working-class. Nothing could be more comically mistaken. Most of the early Fascist leaders had spent years trying to get the workers to become revolutionary. As late as June 1914, Mussolini took part enthusiastically, at risk of his own life and limb, in the violent and confrontational "red week." The initiators of Fascism were mostly seasoned anti-capitalist militants who had time and again given the working class the benefit of the doubt. The working class, by not becoming revolutionary, had let these revolutionaries down.
In the late 1920s, people like Winston Churchill and Ludwig von Mises saw Fascism as a natural and salutory response to Communist violence. (35) They already overlooked the fact that Fascism represented an independent cultural phenomenon which predated the Bolshevik coup. It became widely accepted that the future lay with either Communism or Fascism, and many people chose what they considered the lesser evil. Evelyn Waugh remarked that he would choose Fascism over Marxism if he had to, but he did not think he had to.
It's easy to see that the rise of Communism stimulated the rise of Fascism. But since the existence of the Soviet regime was what chiefly made Communism attractive, and since Fascism was an independent tradition of revolutionary thinking, there would doubtless have been a powerful Fascist movement even in the absence of a Bolshevik regime. At any rate, after 1922, the same kind of influence worked both ways: many people became Communists because they considered that the most effective way to combat the dreaded Fascism. Two rival gangs of murderous politicos, bent on establishing their own unchecked power, each drummed up support by pointing to the horrors that the other gang would unleash. Whatever the shortcomings of any such appeal, the horrors themselves were all too real. (36)
[SIZE=4]From Liberism to the Corporate State [/SIZE]
In Fascism's early days it encompassed an element of what was called "liberism," the view that capitalism and the free market ought to be left intact, that it was sheer folly for the state to involve itself in "production."
Marx had left a strange legacy: the conviction that resolute pursuit of the class struggle would automatically take the working class in the direction of communism. Since practical experience offers no corroboration for this surmise, Marxists have had to choose between pursuing the class struggle (making trouble for capitalism and hoping that something will turn up) and trying to seize power to introduce communism (which patently has nothing to do with strikes for higher wages or with such political reforms as factory safety legislation). As a result, Marxists came to worship "struggle" for its own sake. And since Marxists were frequently embarrassed to talk about problems a communist society might face, dismissing any such discussion as "utopian", it became easy for them to argue that we should focus only on the next step in the struggle, and not be distracted by speculation about the remote future.
Traditional Marxists had believed that much government interference, such as protective tariffs, should be opposed, as it would slow down the development of the productive forces (technology) and thereby delay the revolution. For this reason, a Marxist should favor free trade. (37) Confronted by a growing volume of legislative reforms, some revolutionaries saw these as shrewd concessions by the bourgeoisie to take the edge off class antagonism and thus stabilize their rule. The fact that such legislative measures were supported by democratic socialists, who had been co-opted into the established order, provided an additional motive for revolutionaries to take the other side.
All these influences might persuade a Marxist that capitalism should be left intact for the foreseeable future. In Italy, a further motive was that Marxists expected the revolution to break out in the industrially advanced countries. No Marxist thought that socialism had anything to offer a backward economy like Italy, unless the revolution occurred first in Britain, America, Germany, and France. As the prospect of any such revolution became less credible, the issue of Italian industrial development was all that remained, and that was obviously a task for capitalism.
After 1919, the Fascists developed a theory of the state; until then this was the one element in Fascist political theory which had not been elaborated. Its elaboration, in an extended public debate, gave rise to the "totalitarian" view of the state, (38) notoriously expounded in Mussolini's formula, "Everything in the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state." Unlike the later National Socialists of Germany, the Fascists remained averse to outright nationalization of industry. But, after a few years of comparative non-intervention, and some liberalization, the Fascist regime moved towards a highly interventionist policy, and Fascist pronouncements increasingly harped on the "corporate state." All traces of liberism were lost, save only for the insistence that actual nationalization be avoided. Before 1930, Mussolini stated that capitalism had centuries of useful work to do (a formulation that would occur only to a former Marxist); after 1930, because of the world depression, he spoke as if capitalism was finished and the corporate state was to replace it rather than providing its framework.
As the dictatorship matured, Fascist rhetoric increasingly voiced explicit hostility to the individual ego. Fascism had always been strongly communitarian but now this aspect became more conspicuous. Fascist anti-individualism is summed up in the assertion that the death of a human being is like the body's loss of a cell. Among the increasingly histrionic blackshirt meetings from 1920 to 1922 were the funeral services. When the name of a comrade recently killed by the Socialists was called out, the whole crowd would roar: "Presente!"
Man is not an atom, man is essentially social--these woolly clichés were as much Fascist as they were socialist. Anti-individualism was especially prominent in the writings of official philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who gave Fascist social theory its finished form in the final years of the regime. (39)
[SIZE=4]The Failure of Fascism [/SIZE]
Fascist ideology had two goals by which Fascism's performance may reasonably be judged: the creation of a heroically moral human being, in a heroically moral social order, and the accelerated development of industry, especially in backward economies like Italy.
The fascist moral ideal, upheld by writers from Sorel to Gentile, is something like an inversion of the caricature of a Benthamite liberal. The fascist ideal man is not cautious but brave, not calculating but resolute, not sentimental but ruthless, not preoccupied with personal advantage but fighting for ideals, not seeking comfort but experiencing life intensely. The early Fascists did not know how they would install the social order which would create this "new man," but they were convinced that they had to destroy the bourgeois liberal order which had created his opposite.
Even as late as 1922 it was not clear to Fascists that Fascism, the "third way" between liberalism and socialism, would set up a bureaucratic police state, but given the circumstances and fundamental Fascist ideas, nothing else was feasible. Fascism introduced a form of state which was claustrophobic in its oppressiveness. The result was a population of decidedly unheroic mediocrities, sly conformists scared of their own shadows, worlds removed from the kind of dynamic human character the Fascists had hoped would inherit the Earth.
As for Fascism's economic performance, a purely empirical test of results is inconclusive. In its first few years, the Mussolini government's economic measures were probably more liberalizing than restrictive. The subsequent turn to intrusive corporatism was swiftly followed by the world slump and then the war. But we do know from numerous other examples that if it is left to run its course, corporatist interventionism will cripple any economy. (40) Furthermore, economic losses inflicted by the war can be laid at Fascism's door, as Mussolini could easily have kept Italy neutral. Fascism both gave unchecked power to a single individual to commit such a blunder as to take Italy to war in 1940 and made this more likely by extolling the benefits of war.
In the panoramic sweep of history, Fascism, like Communism, like all forms of socialism, and like today's greenism and anti-globalism, is the logical result of specific intellectual errors about human progress. Fascism was an attempt to pluck the material fruits of liberal economics while abolishing liberal culture. (41) The attempt was entirely quixotic: there is no such thing as economic development without free-market capitalism and there is no such thing as free-market capitalism without the recognition of individual rights. The revulsion against liberalism was the outcome of misconceptions, and the futile attempt to supplant liberalism was the application of further misconceptions. By losing the war, Fascism and National Socialism spared themselves the terminal sclerosis which beset Communism.
[SIZE=4]"The Man Who Is Seeking" [/SIZE]
When Mussolini switched from anti-war to pro-war in November 1914, the other Socialist Party leaders immediately claimed that he had been bought off by the bourgeoisie, and this allegation has since been repeated by many leftists. But any notion that Mussolini sold out is more far-fetched than the theory that Lenin seized power because he was paid by the German government to take Russia out of the war. As the paramount figure of the Italian left, Mussolini had it made. He was taking a career gamble at very long odds by provoking his own expulsion from the Socialist Party, in addition to risking his life as a front-line soldier. (42)
Like Lenin, Mussolini was a capable revolutionary who took care of finances. Once he had decided to come out as pro-war, he foresaw that he would lose his income from the Socialist Party. He approached wealthy Italian patriots to get support for Il Popolo d'Italia, but much of the money that came to Mussolini originated covertly from Allied governments who wanted to bring Italy into the war. Similarly, Lenin's Bolsheviks took aid from wealthy backers and from the German government. (43) In both cases, we see a determined group of revolutionaries using their wits to raise money in pursuit of their goals.
Jasper Ridley argues that Mussolini switched because he always "wanted to be on the winning side", and dare not "swim against the tide of public opinion." (44) This explanation is feeble. Mussolini had spent all his life in an antagonistic position to the majority of Italians, and with the founding of a new party in 1919 he would again deliberately set himself at odds with the majority. Since individuals are usually more influenced by the pressure of their "reference group" than by the opinions of the whole population, we might wonder why Mussolini did not swim with the tide of the Socialist Party leadership and the majority of the Party membership, instead of swimming with the tide of those socialists inside and outside the Party who had become pro-war.
Although his personality may have influenced the timing, or even the actual decision, the pressure for Mussolini to change his position came from a long-term evolution in his intellectual convictions. From his earliest years as a Marxist revolutionary, Mussolini had been sympathetic to syndicalism, and then an actual syndicalist. Unlike other syndicalists, he remained in the Socialist Party, and as he rose within it, he continued to keep his ears open to those syndicalists who had left it. On many issues, his thinking followed theirs, more cautiously, and often five or ten years behind them.
From 1902 to 1914, Italian revolutionary syndicalism underwent a rapid evolution. Always opposed to parliamentary democracy, Italian syndicalists, under Sorel's influence, became more committed to extra-constitutional violence and the necessity for the revolutionary vanguard to ignite a conflagration. As early as 1908, Mussolini the syndicalist Marxist had come to agree with these elitist notions and began to employ the term gerarchia (hierarchy), which would remain a favorite word of his into the Fascist period.
Many syndicalists lost faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class. Seeking an alternative revolutionary recipe, the most "advanced" of these syndicalists began to ally themselves with the nationalists and to favor war. Mussolini's early reaction to this trend was the disgust we might expect from any self-respecting leftist. (45) But given their premises, the syndicalists' conclusions were persuasive.
The logic underlying their shifting position was that there was unfortunately going to be no working-class revolution, either in the advanced countries, or in less developed countries like Italy. Italy was on its own, and Italy's problem was low industrial output. (46) Italy was an exploited proletarian nation, while the richer countries were bloated bourgeois nations. The nation was the myth which could unite the productive classes behind a drive to expand output. These ideas foreshadowed the Third World propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s, in which aspiring elites in economically backward countries represented their own less than scrupulously humane rule as "progressive" because it would accelerate Third World development. From Nkrumah to Castro, Third World dictators would walk in Mussolini's footsteps. (47) Fascism was a full dress rehearsal for post-war Third Worldism.
Many syndicalists also became "productionists," urging that the workers ought not to strike, but to take over the factories and keep them running without the bosses. While productionism as a tactic of industrial action did not lead anywhere, the productionist idea implied that all who helped to expand output, even a productive segment of the bourgeoisie, should be supported rather than opposed.
From about 1912, those who closely observed Mussolini noted changes in his rhetoric. He began to employ the words "people" and "nation" in preference to "proletariat." (Subsequently such patriotic language would become acceptable among Marxists, but then it was still unusual and somewhat suspect.) Mussolini was gradually becoming convinced, a few years later than the most advanced leaders of the extreme left, that Marxist class analysis was useless, that the proletariat would never become revolutionary, and that the nation had to be the vehicle of development. An elementary implication of this position is that leftist-initiated strikes and violent confrontations are not merely irrelevant pranks but actual hindrances to progress.
When Mussolini founded Utopia, it was to provide a forum at which his Party comrades could exchange ideas with his friends the revolutionary syndicalists outside the Party. He signed his articles at this time "The Man Who Is Seeking." The collapse of the Second International on the outbreak of war, and the lining up of the mass socialist parties of Germany, France, and Austria behind their respective national governments, confirmed once again that the syndicalists had been right: proletarian internationalism was not a living force. The future, he concluded, lay with productionist national syndicalism, which with some tweaking would become Fascism.
Mussolini believed that Fascism was an international movement. He expected that both decadent bourgeois democracy and dogmatic Marxism-Leninism would everywhere give way to Fascism, that the twentieth century would be a century of Fascism. Like his leftist contemporaries, he underestimated the resilience of both democracy and free-market liberalism. But in substance Mussolini's prediction was fulfilled: most of the world's people in the second half of the twentieth century were ruled by governments which were closer in practice to Fascism than they were either to liberalism or to Marxism-Leninism.
The twentieth century was indeed the Fascist century.
[I]This article first appeared in LIBERTY magazine. Their website can be found at [url]http://www.libertysoft.com/liberty/index.html[/url] [/I]
[SIZE=3]Notes [/SIZE]
Original words from the 1934 song by Cole Porter. They were amended later.(back)
At the Munich conference in 1938, Mussolini was the only person present who could follow all the discussions in the four languages employed.(back)
Amadeo Bordiga, Angelo Tasca, and Karl Liebknecht.(back)
Although Italy was a member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria, support for the Central Powers in Italy was negligible.(back)
It remained Mussolini's paper through the Fascist period. At first it was described as a "Socialist Daily." Later this was changed to "The Daily of Fighters and Producers."(back)
It was first called the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Leagues), changing its name in 1921 to the National Fascist Party. Fasci is plural of fascio, a union or league. The word had been in common use for various local and ad hoc radical groups, mainly of the left.(back)
Of the seven who attended the preparatory meeting two days before the launch, five were former Marxists or syndicalists. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 222. At the launch itself, the majority had a nationalist background.(back)
Garibaldi's followers had worn red shirts. Corradini's nationalists, absorbed into the Fascist Party in 1923, wore blue shirts.(back)
Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 95.(back)
Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1957), vol. 3, p. 180.(back)
Prior to 1938 the Fascist Party had substantial Jewish membership and support. There is no agreement among scholars on Mussolini's motives for introducing anti-Jewish legislation. For one well-argued view, see Gregor, Contemporary Radical Ideologies: Totalitarian Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 149-159.(back)
Among numerous sources on the life of Mussolini, see Richard Collier, Duce! A Biography of Benito Mussolini (New York: Viking, 1971); Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1982); Jasper Ridley, Mussolini: A Biography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). All such works are out of their depth when they touch on Fascist ideas. For a superb account of all the fascist and other non-Communist dictatorial movements of the time, see Payne, History. On Mussolini's ideas, see A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Sternhell, Birth, Chapter 5.(back)
It's now usual to capitalize 'Fascism' when it refers to the Italian movement, and not when the word refers to a broader cultural phenomenon including other political movements in other countries.(back)
Chicago has an avenue named after the brutal blackshirt leader and famous aviator, Italo Balbo, following his specatacular 1933 visit to the city. Chicago's Columbus Monument bears the words "This monument has seen the glory of the wings of Italy led by Italo Balbo." See Claudio G. Segrè, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).(back)
The evolution of this incredible theory is mercilessly documented in Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), chs. 2-5. For a good brief survey of interpretations of Fascism, see Payne, History, ch. 12. For a detailed examination, see Gregor, Interpretations of Fascism (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997).(back)
Confronted with egregious high-handedness by authority, working-class Americans call it "Communism." Middle-class Americans, educated enough to understand that it's uncouth to say anything against Communism, call if "fascism."(back)
Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1962).(back)
Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), vol. I, p. xiii, and vols. I and II, passim.(back)
On Hendrik de Man, also known as Henri De Man, see Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Mussolini exchanged letters with de Man in which both tacitly recognized that de Man was following Mussolini's intellectual trajectory of 10-15 years earlier. Sternhell, Birth, p. 246. To this day there are disciples of de Man who treat his acceptance of the Third Reich as something like a seizure rather than as the culmination of his earlier thought, just as there are leftist admirers of Sorel who refuse to admit Sorel's pre-fascism.(back)
The most illuminating single work is Sternhell, Birth. Other important accounts are: Gregor, Young Mussolini; Gregor, Faces of Janus; Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left; Payne, History. A useful collection of old and new readings is Roger Griffin, ed., International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (London: Arnold, 1998). Important works in Italian include those of Renzo de Felice and Emilio Gentile.(back)
The Fascist government imposed measures which were intended to promote modernization. They were not necessary and their effectiveness was mixed. Italian output grew rapidly, but so it had in earlier years.(back)
Many would not yet have acknowledged that there was no falling rate of profit and no concentrating trend in industry, but all had to agree that these were proceeding far more slowly than earlier Marxists had expected.(back)
Before the 1890s, there was no more impeccable a Marxist than Bernstein. He had been a friend of Marx and Engels, who maintained a confidence in his ideological soundness that they placed in very few individuals. His 1899 book, known in English as Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken, 1961), is put together from controversial articles he began publishing in 1896.(back)
The impact of anti-rationalism on socialism not only helped to form Fascism, but also had a broad influence on the left. Like Fascism, the thinking of leftist writers such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell arises from the impact on nineteenth-century socialism of the fin de siècle offensive against rationalism, materialism, individualism, and romanticism.(back)
The strong influence of Sorel on the formation of Fascism has now been heavily documented. See, for example, Sternhell, Birth. In earlier years, some writers used to minimize this influence or deny Sorel's close affinity with Fascism.(back)
Sorel's was the old-fashioned kind of antisemitism, which always made room for some good Jews. Among these Sorel counted Henri Bergson. Sternhell, Birth, p. 86.(back)
It was also inferred from experience. It could be observed that if the one or two strongest personalities behind a strike were somehow neutralized, the strike would collapse.(back)
In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin maintained that the working class, left to itself, could develop only "trade union consciousness." To make the working class revolutionary required the intervention of "professional revolutionaries."(back)
See Gregor, Young Mussolini, ch. 4.(back)
The Crowd (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995). The early nineteenth century had seen a fascination with hypnosis (then called Mesmerism). The late nineteenth century witnessed an extrapolation of the model of hypnosis onto wider human phenomena. Le Bon argued that, in groups, individuals become hypnotized and lose responsibility for their actions. Scholars, other than French ones, now believe that Le Bon was a dishonest self-promoter who successfully exaggerated his own originality, and that his claims about crowd behavior are mostly wrong. His influence was tremendous. Freud was steeped in Le Bon. The discussion of propaganda in Hitler's Mein Kampf, which strikes most readers as more entertaining than the rest of the book, echoes Le Bon.(back)
Gregor, Young Mussolini. This was precisely the view of many Communists in the early years of the Comintern. Payne, History, p. 126.(back)
Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969 [1944]), pp. 55-58.(back)
"If by mysticism one intends the recognition of truth without the employment of reason, I would be the first to declare myself opposed to every mysticism." Mussolini, quoted in Gregor, Contemporary Radical Ideologies, p. 331.(back)
Mussolini was openly an atheist prior to 1922, when his conversion was staged for transparently political reasons. In addition to his many articles and speeches criticizing religion, Mussolini wrote a pamphlet, Man and Divinity, attacking the Church from a materialist standpoint and also wrote a strongly anti-Catholic book on Jan Hus, the fifteenth-century Czech victim of Catholic persecution. Until it became politically inexpedient, Mussolini gave a speech every year on the anniversary of the murder by the Church of the freethinker Giordano Bruno in 1600. In office, Mussolini worked with the Church, generally gave it what it wanted, and was rewarded with its enthusiastic endorsement.(back)
On Churchill's fulsome praise of Fascism throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, see Ridley, Mussolini, pp. 187-88, 230, 281. For Mises's more guarded praise in 1927, see Mises, The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1962), pp. 47-51.(back)
The Fascist government was appallingly oppressive compared with the democratic regime which preceded it, but distinctly less oppressive than Communism or National Socialism. Payne, History, pp. 121-23.(back)
Karl Marx, Speech on the Question of Free Trade. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International, 1976), vol. 6, pp. 450-465.(back)
The word "totalitarian" (totalitario) was first used against Fascism by a liberal opponent, Giovanni Amendola. It was then taken up proudly by Fascists to characterize their own form of state. Later the term was widely employed to refer to the common features of the Fascist, Soviet, and Nazi dictatorships or to denote an ideal type of unlimited government. In this sense, the word was in common use among Anglophone intellectuals by 1935, and in the popular media by 1941. Ironically, Fascist Italy was in practice much less "totalitarian" than the Soviet Union or the Third Reich, though the regime was methodically moving toward totalitarianism.(back)
On Gentile's ideas see Gregor, Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999), chs. 5-6.(back)
The most outstanding American scholar of Fascism is A. James Gregor. A shortcoming of Gregor's analysis is his tendency to assume that Fascist economic policy could work, that it is possible for a Fascist government to stimulate industrial growth. Any such view has to somehow come to terms with the fact that Italian economic growth was robust before World War I.(back)
"Liberal" means classical liberal or libertarian.(back)
Ignazio Silone held that Mussolini unscrupulously aimed only at power for himself. The School for Dictators (New York: Harper, 1939). While this is less preposterous than the theory that he sold out for financial gain, it too cannot be squared with the facts of Mussolini's life.(back)
Angelica Balabanoff, socialist activist and Mussolini's mistress intermittently from 1904 on, was in Lenin's entourage, shipped with him into Russia in the famous German "sealed train."(back)
Ridley, Mussolini, p. 67.(back)
Sternhell, Birth, p. 202.(back)
It may seem odd that there was such anxiety about Italian development when the Italian economy was growing quite lustily: precisely the same paradox arises with recent leftist attitudes to "poverty in the Third World."(back)
On the striking similarities between Fascism and African Socialism, see Gregor, Contemporary Radical Ideologies, Chapter 7.(back) [/FONT]
2005-07-26 17:15 | User Profile
[I]A piece from Thomas DiLorenzo (whose great book "The Real Lincoln" I have read recently), dealing with the somewhat same theme:[/I]
[url]http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo95.html[/url]
[FONT=Arial]
[SIZE=5]Left/Right Futility[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][I]It's centralism/decentralism that really counts, says Thomas J. DiLorenzo.[/I][/SIZE]
[B]by Thomas J. DiLorenzo[/B]
During the Abbeville Instituteââ¬â¢s week-long summer school a few weeks ago a student asked the Instituteââ¬â¢s founder and director, Professor Don Livingston of Emory University, a question about the composition of "The Left" and "The Right" in American politics today. He wanted Professor Livingstonââ¬â¢s opinion of the prospects for the success of "The Right" to get the country to move in a more conservative direction. Professor Livingston correctly pointed out that the premise of the question was all wrong.
The premise, of course, was that Americaââ¬â¢s highly centralized, monopolistic, imperialistic, federal government ââ¬â the Lincolnite state ââ¬â is desirable if not inevitable. Consequently, the route to greater freedom and prosperity is for "The Right" to control the federal Leviathan and use the levers of federal power to achieve its political ends.
It is true that, since the death of genuine federalism ââ¬â sometimes called "statesââ¬â¢ rights" ââ¬â in 1865, this has indeed been the political game. But it is not inevitable. An alternative way of thinking of how to achieve a freer and more prosperous society is through the devolution of political power, as Professor Livingston responded. Therein lies the only hope of citizens ever being able to control their own government and becoming sovereign over it once again.
Forget about the fantasy of controlling the federal government. It has accumulated so much power and created so many vested interests in that power, that any genuine conservatives or libertarians who become a part of it are immediately targeted, sabotaged, worn down, smeared, and marginalized so that they have no influence whatsoever. The entire apparatus of the centralized state will always view this as its number one priority.
Libertarians were not always so naïve and uneducated about American history as to believe in the oxymoronic notion of "libertarian centralization," as do todayââ¬â¢s advocates of a strengthened federal judiciary that will supposedly enhance individual liberty. Todayââ¬â¢s libertarian centralizers have been educated/brainwashed by the New England version of history, which is essentially one long, tall tale of alleged super-achievements by the glorious, Lincolnite state, armed with its 14th Amendment, its activist Supreme Court, its military, and other alleged tools of "equal justice."
One can always cite a few examples where the central government actually promoted liberty, or where state and local governments behaved tyrannically, but in general monopolistic, centralized government has always been the natural enemy of liberty and prosperity and the indispensable tool of tyrants everywhere. The question is not whether we shall have a "perfect" system of government, which of course is impossible here on Earth. And no one ââ¬â certainly not Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the American system of statesââ¬â¢ rights ââ¬â ever argued that state and local politicians would not attempt to deprive citizens of their liberties, just as all politicians do. The "perfection" of state and local government is a red herring argument that was first put forth by Lincoln in his attacks on the Jeffersonian system of statesââ¬â¢ rights and has been mindlessly repeated ever since by advocates of a more highly centralized state, especially the libertarian centralizers who complain about "grassroots tyranny" while arguing for a more powerful central government.
In short, the Jeffersonian ideal of a highly decentralized state, where whatever state power exists is held largely at the state and local levels, is more likely to produce a process that will be more conducive to liberty and prosperity than will the centralized, monopolistic, Lincolnite state that Americans now slave under.
Unlike today's libertarian centralizers, Jefferson sought to weaken, not strengthen, the federal judiciary, which he described as "the corps of sappers & miners, steadily working to undermine the independent rights of the states" and to consolidate all power in the central government. It was of utmost importance to Jefferson that each state "might do for itself what concerns itself directly, and what it can so much better do than a distant authority." Moreover, "Every state again is divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within its local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by its individual properietor. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, & when to reap, we should soon want bread" (see Merrill D. Peterson, Jefferson Writings, p. 74).
Under such a system of genuine federalism governments are forced to compete for population and businesses with moderate tax and spending policies; if they enact bad policies they at least do not subject the entire nation to them; people are free to "vote with their feet" and exit excessively oppressive governmental jurisdictions; and governments are much more likely to be controlled by the populace the closer they are to the people.
This is the essence of genuine federalism and was understood by the other American political tradition, the largely southern, Jeffersonian one that was eclipsed in the post-1865 era (see Felix Morley, Freedom and Federalism; James J. Kilpatrick, The Sovereign States; Forrest McDonald, Statesââ¬â¢ Rights and the Union; St. George Tucker, A View of the Constitution of the United States; Clyde Wilson, From Union to Empire; and William Watkins, Reclaiming the American Revolution). If "libertarian centralizers" (or "regime libertarians," as Lew Rockwell calls them) were not so obsessively preoccupied with being politically correct and "acceptable" to the Washington establishment, the "liberal" media, and the academic Left, they would take some time to educate themselves in this literature and on some relevant American history as well. With regard to the latter, a relevant publication is a book that Professor Clyde Wilson regards as the best book ever written on the subject of the "Civil War" and Reconstruction. It is North Against South: The American Iliad, 1848ââ¬â1877, by Ludwell H. Johnson, professor emeritus of history at William and Mary College.
Professor Johnson argues that "The Confederate Constitution throws considerable light on the reasons for secession" (see Marshall DeRosa, The Confederate Constitution of 1861). Like the U.S. Constitution, it outlawed the African slave trade but declared slavery to be legal. (But unlike the U.S. Constitution, it permitted individual states to abolish slavery. At the exact same time this stipulation was being added to the Confederate Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party were supporting a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the federal government from ever ending slavery).
In addition, the Confederate Constitution restricted the powers of the central government much more than the U.S. Constitution did by abolishing the "General Welfare" Clause; explicitly declaring that the states were sovereign; "delegating" and not "granting" any powers to the central government; allowing constitutional amendments to only be initiated by the states; outlawing protectionist tariffs altogether; making all federal expenditures more difficult by requiring a two-thirds vote of Congress and giving the president a line-item veto; and more.
"These innovations," writes Professor Johnson, "can be summarized as an attempt to protect the rights of the states, to limit the power of the central government . . ." Southern secession can only be understood, says Professor Johnson, by realizing that "Underlying the Southern movement for independence was an abiding passion to be free from outside control and interference. This is a phenomenon with deep roots in Anglo-American history." More precisely:
[I]Southern belief in a Northern determination to transform the United States into a consolidated nation, where the majority must always rule a central government endowed with large, indefinite implied powers, loomed as a grave threat to many Southernersââ¬â¢ most cherished ideals of society, of government, of life itself. When secessionists insisted that they left the union to preserve statesââ¬â¢ rights, they meant exactly that. In the last analysis, they seceded for an idea, the idea that they would not meekly submit to Northern rule. If they were rebels, so be it. After all, it was the name their "patriot fathers bore."[/I]
One nineteenth-century libertarian who understood this was Lord Acton, the great British historian of liberty who was a major intellectual force in Victorian England. Like most British opinion makers, Lord Acton believed Lincoln when he said that his purpose was not to end southern slavery but to "save the union." But Acton saw through Lincolnââ¬â¢s slick rhetoric and understood that "saving the union" meant destroying the founding fathersââ¬â¢ system of statesââ¬â¢ rights and putting in its place a consolidated, monopolistic empire. In a November 4, 1866 letter to Robert E. Lee he wrote:
[I]I saw in Statesââ¬â¢ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy . . . . Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of [B]our[/B] liberty, [B]our[/B] progress, and [B]our [/B] civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo [/I] (emphasis added).
Lee Responded in a December 15, 1866 letter in which he agreed, adding that "the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."
[B]Lee was prescient. Centralized government would become the scourge of humanity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a natural prerequisite to the advance of communism, fascism, and totalitarianism in general (including welfare state totalitarianism). Americans now live under a regime where a single government agency ââ¬â the Environmental Protection Agency ââ¬â is a bigger bureaucracy than the entire government of the Soviet Union ever likely was. There will never be any hope of American citizens imposing any semblance of control over such bureaucratic monstrosities. [/B]
A conservative or libertarian takeover of the federal Leviathan state is the silliest of pipe dreams. The only hope for restoring a free society is the devolution of power and a complete overthrow of the Lincolnite ideology of government, with all its garish monuments to itself, its "civic religion" of centralized governmental power in pursuit of world domination; its brainwashing of the public through nationalized education; its army of myth-making court historians (a.k.a., "Lincoln scholars"); and its monstrous appetite for tax revenues, which now account for almost half of all national income ââ¬â especially if one counts the implicit "tax" of the costs of government regulation. The devolution of power, combined with the destruction of all the Lincolnite superstitions, is the most hopeful means of emancipating Americaââ¬â¢s tax slaves.
[B]July 26, 2005[/B]
[I]Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold Story of Our Countryââ¬â¢s History, from the Pilgrims to the Present (Crown Forum/Random House, August 2004)[/I] [/FONT]
2005-07-26 19:30 | User Profile
My own opinion about what is referred to as "socialism" [i.e. a government which controls most of the social, political and legal matters within a country] changed when I read about Argentina's "Dirty War," which occurred in the late 1970s [I've mentioned this topic before].
Argentina restored itself and its culture by creating and putting into place a military government. That government used its power to transform Argentina from a violent, unsafe country into a safe, stable country. [Granted, if you were a Marxist in that country back then, things weren't so great]. But normal people in Argentina saw their country return to normal via a government that was described as totalitarian by leftists worldwide.
The idea that a powerful, controlling government is[I] always[/I] a bad thing was proven wrong back then. In fact, such a government saved Argentina.
Granted, each country in the world is different. In other words, what works in one country may not work in another country.
2005-07-26 23:49 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr][I]A piece from Thomas DiLorenzo (whose great book "The Real Lincoln" I have read recently), dealing with the somewhat same theme:[/I] Sounds like a paleolibertarian or just a libertarian viewpoint.
One nineteenth-century libertarian who understood this was Lord Acton, the great British historian of liberty who was a major intellectual force in Victorian England. Like most British opinion makers, Lord Acton believed Lincoln when he said that his purpose was not to end southern slavery but to "save the union." But Acton saw through Lincolnââ¬â¢s slick rhetoric and understood that "saving the union" meant destroying the founding fathersââ¬â¢ system of statesââ¬â¢ rights and putting in its place a consolidated, monopolistic empire. In a November 4, 1866 letter to Robert E. Lee he wrote:.........
[I]Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold Story of Our Countryââ¬â¢s History, from the Pilgrims to the Present (Crown Forum/Random House, August 2004)[/I] [/QUOTE]Libertarians always have some elequent pieces, but they never get to the core issues.
2005-07-27 03:19 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Franco]The idea that a powerful, controlling government is[I] always[/I] a bad thing was proven wrong back then. In fact, such a government saved Argentina.
Granted, each country in the world is different. In other words, what works in one country may not work in another country.-----------[/QUOTE]
In other words as Moeller van den Bruck said "every people has a right to its own socialism"
This is hit upon in this article also.
[QUOTE=Petr-DiLorenzo]In power, the actual institutions of Fascism and Communism tended to converge. In practice, the Fascist and National Socialist regimes increasingly tended to conform to what Mises calls "[I]the German pattern[/I] of Socialism." (32) [/QUOTE]
2005-07-27 03:29 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Franco]My own opinion about what is referred to as "socialism" [i.e. a government which controls most of the social, political and legal matters within a country] changed when I read about Argentina's "Dirty War," which occurred in the late 1970s [I've mentioned this topic before].
Argentina restored itself and its culture by creating and putting into place a military government. That government used its power to transform Argentina from a violent, unsafe country into a safe, stable country. [Granted, if you were a Marxist in that country back then, things weren't so great]. But normal people in Argentina saw their country return to normal via a government that was described as totalitarian by leftists worldwide.
The idea that a powerful, controlling government is[I] always[/I] a bad thing was proven wrong back then. In fact, such a government saved Argentina.
Granted, each country in the world is different. In other words, what works in one country may not work in another country.
-----------[/QUOTE]
good post, Franco. We are not going to get out of our current mess without some form of socialism. them's the facts. period.
2005-07-27 05:14 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Bardamu]good post, Franco. We are not going to get out of our current mess without some form of socialism. them's the facts. period.[/QUOTE]Spengler's version on it was "the choice for conservatism was socialism or perishing".
2005-07-27 17:32 | User Profile
First I would like to applaud the essay with which this thread begins, specifically for mentioning Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism. If you have never read Lewis you owe it to yourself to try. He was a painter as well as a writer, a contemporary of Picasso and Braque as well as Joyce, Pound and Proust.
Our problem is no longer that of increasing industrial production! It might be true that only a weak central authority is compatible with optimal economic growth (it isn't true, but it might be!) UNDER conditions which allow that growth in the first place. In the 1920s, the great adventure of burning the oil available on our globe as quickly as possible had barely begun. Now, the oil is about half gone and the growth in consumption of oil cannot continue. For other reasons, other facets of "growth" will also have to shatter.
Of course, if I were a Fascist, or one of those filthy White Nationalists, I would probably try to work these facts into my evil, reprehensible thinking.
2005-07-27 18:34 | User Profile
[QUOTE=cygnus]Our problem is no longer that of increasing industrial production! It might be true that only a weak central authority is compatible with optimal economic growth (it isn't true, but it might be!) UNDER conditions which allow that growth in the first place. Well that certainly is I think one of the genuinely and underestimated defects in the Third Reich. It is regarded for some reason as an economic wunderkund, in spite of its other faults (at least to the rest of the world). Actually in many ways I think it was an economic and industrial basket case, which bears a big and vastly underestimated by most people at least role in its defeat.
[QUOTE]In the 1920s, the great adventure of burning the oil available on our globe as quickly as possible had barely begun. Now, the oil is about half gone and the growth in consumption of oil cannot continue. For other reasons, other facets of "growth" will also have to shatter. [/QUOTE]That's pie in the sky, coming from someone who obviously is more of a poet and painter than I, but I think less of an engineer.
I could make the argument actually that the energy shortage will compell a great [I]reindustrialization[/I] and overall increase in commodity economic production. All of the technologies which will deal with the decline in oil production - alterative energy sources like nuclear, natural gas, and coal liquafaction, or just energy efficiency technologies, are all very industrial and capital intensive, especially compared with oil.
I get the impression that people in this country are so addled and used to free energy without thinking about it they think when the oil runs out they will all just run to the country, living on their gardens, painting and writing poetry. If they really think that I think they must already be taking all the drugs they think writers, painters and poets take.
Of course, if I were a Fascist, or one of those filthy White Nationalists, I would probably try to work these facts into my evil, reprehensible thinking.[/QUOTE]:lol:
2005-07-27 23:01 | User Profile
"I get the impression that people in this country are so addled and used to free energy without thinking about it they think when the oil runs out they will all just run to the country, living on their gardens, painting and writing poetry. If they really think that I think they must already be taking all the drugs they think writers, painters and poets take.
Oh, Okieredust, do you mean me? If so you are mistaken. I hardly think that a deranged ecotopia awaits postpeak. You may well be more of an engineer than I am. But I have fewer issues with engineers than you apparently do with your betters. May I suggest that we end this before it continues?
2005-07-28 03:57 | User Profile
[QUOTE=cygnus] Oh, Okieredust, do you mean me? If so you are mistaken. I hardly think that a deranged ecotopia awaits postpeak. Well actually almost everyone in the country thinks that pretty much. Your doubtless far more aware than most.
You may well be more of an engineer than I am. But I have fewer issues with engineers than you apparently do with your betters.[/QUOTE]Oh I'm sorry. You artistic types are so emotional and touchy :lol:
2005-07-28 17:03 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Of course, if I were a Fascist, or one of those filthy White Nationalists, I would probably try to work these facts into my evil, reprehensible thinking.[/QUOTE]
What exactly is a "filthy White Nationalist?" Please give details.
2005-07-28 17:49 | User Profile
[COLOR=Red][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "My own opinion about what is referred to as "socialism" [i.e. a government which controls most of the social, political and legal matters within a country] changed when I read about Argentina's "Dirty War," which occurred in the late 1970s [I've mentioned this topic before]."[/I][/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
Well, allow me to offer some additional viewpoints as a Finn:
In 1918, Finland suffered a serious Communist uprising, similar to the civil war between "Reds" and "Whites" in Russia - only in our country, Reds got whipped. You may read details here:
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Civil_War[/url]
Reds were put down pretty brutally:
[I]"The conflict and its immediate aftermath are considered to have killed more than 30,000 out of a population of three million."[/I]
In spite of all this, Finland stayed as a stable parliamentary democracy, not turning into Fascist or National Socialist path. We even repelled Stalin's invasion in the Winter War in 1939 without turning into a permanent military dictatorship.
[COLOR=Red][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "Argentina restored itself and its culture by creating and putting into place a military government. That government used its power to transform Argentina from a violent, unsafe country into a safe, stable country."[/I][/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
You may have slightly misunderstood my position. I am not any doctrinaire libertarian, but rather advocate [B]a proper mix between conservatism and libertarianism[/B], with Christianity acting as the decisive balancing factor between those two - see here for more on my ideal social theory:
[COLOR=DarkGreen][B][SIZE=3]"Libertarianism, Conservatism, and Christianity "[/SIZE][/B][/COLOR]
[url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19177&highlight=fielding[/url]
There is a time and place for everything, and Communist insurrection is a place to employ some statist power. [I]This does not necessarily necessitate a permanent Fascist-statist dictatorship[/I].
I think we can legitimately draw a line between [B]reactionary[/B] and [B]national-socialistic[/B] movements. For example, I do not consider Francisco Franco to have been a "Fascist" but simply a reactionary traditionalist.
(I am here referring to the word "reactionary" in a positive sense, as a "re-action" to Communist/colored aggression; leftists have quite successfully turned "reactionary" into a dirty word)
I would also consider the original Ku Klux Klan to have been a reactionary, not a Fascist organization. It did not have megalomaniacal statist-revolutionary goals, but merely intended to restore the proper status quo.
Augusto Pinochet is another example of a good traditionalist [I]reactionary[/I] who did not turn into the revolutionary totalitarian path after crushing Commies.
Indeed, I would find the [I]un-traditional, crypto-socialist [/I] nature of Italian and German systems to have been manifested in their [B]grandiose[/B] [B]imperialistic schemes[/B] which are the Fascist equivalent of the Socialist idea of World Revolution.
(Neo"cons" are clearly Fascists by this definition)
Hitler's thirst for [I]lebensraum[/I] in Russia, and Mussolini's somewhat more fanciful idea of turning Mediterranean sea once more as Italy's [I]mare nostrum[/I] differ starkly from the behavior of Franco and Pinochet: once they had cleaned up their own country, they avoided any foreign adventures.
Perhaps this was because they were both professional soldiers, unlike Hitler and Mussolini who came from a civilian background - Finland's military leader during the put-down of Reds in 1918, General Mannerheim, was also a career soldier.
And of course, both Mussolini and Hitler had strong anti-clerical/anti-Christian tendencies whereas Franco and Pinochet did not. Another sign of the statist socialism peeking out in the former ones.
[FONT=Arial][COLOR=Red][B][I] - "Granted, each country in the world is different. In other words, what works in one country may not work in another country."[/I][/B][/COLOR][/FONT]
Very true. For example, Fascism never penetrated Italian masses in the same way as Nazism did in Germany.
(And even Communism is a much more harmless system in the hands of some laybacked Latinos in Cuba than among kamikaze-mentality Mongoloids in North Korea...)
Petr
2005-07-28 19:19 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]Perhaps this was because they were both professional soldiers, unlike Hitler and Mussolini who came from a civilian background - Finland's military leader during the put-down of Reds in 1918, General Mannerheim, was also a career soldier.[/QUOTE] Didn't Mussolini and Hitler both serve in Jew War I? I was under the impression that Mussolini had served as a fighter pilot and Hitler had served as a dispatch rider in that conflict.
[QUOTE=Petr]And of course, both Mussolini and Hitler had strong anti-clerical/anti-Christian tendencies whereas Franco and Pinochet did not. Another sign of the statist socialism peeking out in the former ones.[/QUOTE] Weren't they both Roman Catholics, who were never excommunicated from the church? Didn't Hitler make the statement that he was and would remain a Roman Catholic? This doesn't sound like the actions or rhetoric of one who is anti-clerical or anti-Christian.
2005-07-28 19:39 | User Profile
[COLOR=Purple][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "Didn't Mussolini and Hitler both serve in Jew War I? "[/I][/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
Serving once as a low-level foot-soldier doesn't count - I was talking about [I]professional career soldiers[/I], and Hitler's conflict with the Prussian military caste is well known.
(And surely you don't think that Jews started the WW I?)
[COLOR=Purple][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "Weren't they both Roman Catholics, who were never excommunicated from the church? Didn't Hitler make the statement that he was and would remain a Roman Catholic?"[/I][/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
Here you have a quote from Hitler's "Table Talk" (1941-44):
[COLOR=Sienna][B][I]"A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation."[/I]
TT, 12/13/41[/B][/COLOR]
I am not aware of Hitler [B]ever[/B] participating in a Roman Catholic Mass, or at least after his childhood years. Mussolini wrote bitterly anti-clerical pamphlets in his Socialist pre-WW I years.
Petr
2005-07-28 20:51 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr][COLOR=Red][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "My own opinion about what is referred to as "socialism" [i.e. a government which controls most of the social, political and legal matters within a country] changed when I read about Argentina's "Dirty War," which occurred in the late 1970s [I've mentioned this topic before]."[/I][/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
Well, allow me to offer some additional viewpoints as a Finn:
In 1918, Finland suffered a serious Communist uprising, similar to the civil war between "Reds" and "Whites" in Russia - only in our country, Reds got whipped. You may read details here:
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Civil_War[/url]
Reds were put down pretty brutally:
[I]"The conflict and its immediate aftermath are considered to have killed more than 30,000 out of a population of three million."[/I]
In spite of all this, Finland stayed as a stable parliamentary democracy, not turning into Fascist or National Socialist path. We even repelled Stalin's invasion in the Winter War in 1939 without turning into a permanent military dictatorship. I think this is pretty much because Finland's leaders and elites had absorbed enough of moderate Swedish attitudes and traditions during the long union with Sweden to resist extremist pressure. If I recall there was some fascist Finnish movement and pressure though.
And of course this didn't carry over to the continent as a whole. If I recall, at the time WWII started, there were only two democracies on the European mainland - France and Switzerland.
[COLOR=Red][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "Argentina restored itself and its culture by creating and putting into place a military government. That government used its power to transform Argentina from a violent, unsafe country into a safe, stable country."[/I][/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
You may have slightly misunderstood my position. I am not any doctrinaire libertarian, but rather advocate [B]a proper mix between conservatism and libertarianism[/B], with Christianity acting as the decisive balancing factor between those two - see here for more on my ideal social theory:
[COLOR=DarkGreen][B][SIZE=3]"Libertarianism, Conservatism, and Christianity "[/SIZE][/B][/COLOR]
[url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19177&highlight=fielding[/url]
I'm sorry, I sort of skimmed through this piece, and didn't realize your stance. I was sort of thrown off by your "Libertarianism in One Lesson" reference, by Bergland. I confused it with [URL=http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showpost.php?p=56802&postcount=2]another piece by that name[/URL], which is slightly less complimentary. :wink:
Interestingly it also contains some comments by Linder on Libertarianism, which I've read about from other people but never actually seen.
2005-07-28 21:47 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]Serving once as a low-level foot-soldier doesn't count - I was talking about professional career soldiers, and Hitler's conflict with the Prussian military caste is well known.
(And surely you don't think that Jews started the WW I?)[/QUOTE] Your opinion of the infantry shows. Of course if you ever have to serve as one, it might change. So, serving as an enlisted Infantry combatant in a major conflict doesn't qualify. Yes, I do think the jews are a major influence in the start of most wars. As Rothshield said 'conflict is the yeast of the International bankers bread.'
[QUOTE=Petr]Here you have a quote from Hitler's "Table Talk" (1941-44):
[color=sienna]"A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation."
TT, 12/13/41[/color] [/QUOTE]I believe Martin Bormann to be a liar.
2005-07-29 03:57 | User Profile
[FONT=Arial][B][I] - "Your opinion of the infantry shows."[/I][/B][/FONT]
There's no need for you to start taking things personally - I simply pointed out that like it or not, there is world of difference of being a simple recruit with an essentially civilian background, and a high-level career officer. Prussians had a high class-conciousness in this regard. Heck, many active duty officers often look down even on reserve officers...
[FONT=Arial][B][I] - "Of course if you ever have to serve as one, it might change. "[/I][/B][/FONT]
I have served in the Finnish artillery. (We have a common draft in Finland)
[FONT=Arial][B][I] - "I believe Martin Bormann to be a liar."[/I][/B][/FONT]
You may believe what you wish, but even David Irving has vouched for the reliability of "Table Talks".
Petr
2005-07-29 06:03 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]There's no need for you to start taking things personally - I simply pointed out that like it or not, there is world of difference of being a simple recruit with an essentially civilian background, and a high-level career officer. Prussians had a high class-conciousness in this regard. Heck, many active duty officers often look down even on reserve officers...[/QUOTE]It's not taken personal, I served as an Aviation Warrant Officer- helicopter pilot in the US Army. I only pointed out that from your rhetoric, you seem to have a disdain for the low-level infantryman, as you referred to them. If they served in combat in WWI, they were more than a simple recruit. I would venture to say that as a fighter pilot Mussolini was no doubt an officer. Class-conciousness and serving as a career officer doesn't necessarily mean competence. Many of these Prussian career officers were as incompetent, as they were arrogant.
[QUOTE=Petr]I have served in the Finnish artillery. (We have a common draft in Finland)[/QUOTE]Still not the Infantry.
[QUOTE=Petr]David Irving has vouched for the reliability of "Table Talks".[/QUOTE]So this makes it fact?
2005-07-29 11:13 | User Profile
This bickering is distracting this thread. My main point is that the lack of professional military background probably influenced the [B]lackadaisical[/B] way that both Mussolini and Hitler led their countries into various destructive wars.
(It is widely acknowledged that Hitler had natural tactical talent, but his deficiencies were clear in the area of grand strategic planning)
Petr
2005-08-01 15:17 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr][COLOR=Purple][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "Weren't they both Roman Catholics, who were never excommunicated from the church? Didn't Hitler make the statement that he was and would remain a Roman Catholic?"[/I][/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
Here you have a quote from Hitler's "Table Talk" (1941-44):
[COLOR=Sienna][B][I]"A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation."[/I]
TT, 12/13/41[/B][/COLOR]
I am not aware of Hitler [B]ever[/B] participating in a Roman Catholic Mass, or at least after his childhood years. Mussolini wrote bitterly anti-clerical pamphlets in his Socialist pre-WW I years.
Petr[/QUOTE]This discussion is a bit old, but the issue of Hitler's conversations in [I]Table Talks[/I] I think keeps coming up with regard to the general question of Hitler and National Socialism's in general atttudes toward religion, which is a constant bone of contention.
With regard to [I]Table Talks[/I] itself, the picture it paints of Hitler as a raving hater of Christians seems to be useful both to paleo's who retain a deep suspicion of National Socialism and all authoritarian ideologies as inherent and implacable enemies of religion and Christianity (hence they drift toward paleolibertarianism) and of course some of the implacable frothing at the mouth anti-Christian Neo-Nazi's currently around. I really want to question both perspectives.
Martin Bormann's veracity and fundamental identity really has been called into question by Kilzer, who thinks he's a Soviet sympathizer. That would certainly explain one reason for his putting an anti-religious slant in [I]Table Talks[/I]. Even if the quotes are true in [I]Table Talks[/I] though, you have to keep them in perspective. They were private conversations, (of the sort that are normally never remembered in the slightest by posterity, except for Bormann's odd habit of recording everything Hitler said in detail, a habit that seems very likely to have been used by the "Werther/Lucy" spy ring in helping to destroy Germany).
If one were to record similar conversations by movement conservatives of the past decades, I've read many similar things might be said. Its generally known that for a lot of political conservatives, even those promently associated with pro "religious right" positions, they're public piety is not reflected privately. They think religion is something "for the masses". But this doesn't necessarily have a strong negative impact on our view of the consetive movement they lead as a basically very pro-religious, pro-Christian movement. Or at the very least, this is a matter of controversy.
Seen this way, I think what you read in [I]Table Talks [/I] should be taken with a fair amount of salt.