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Posts:
19,822
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(1 of 12)
Aug 11, 2004 8:28 AM
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The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
by Thom Hartmann
The Republican National Committee has recently removed from the top-level pages of their website an advertisement interspersing Hitler's face with those of John Kerry and other prominent Democrats. This little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on Americans who believe some provisions of Bush's PATRIOT Act, his detention of American citizens without charges, his willingness to let corporations write legislation, and the so-called "Free Speech Zones" around his public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism.
The RNC's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the first American Vice President to point out the "American fascists" among us.
Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:
" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. "American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.
As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."
Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote:
" Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."
Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."
Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."
Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his new book "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America - 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush."
The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."
But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.
In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued:
" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added, "They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."
This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).
As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."
Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core: "These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."
But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"
In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism." The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public places.
President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. Which is why it's so critical that this November we join together at the ballot box to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our nation.
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Posts:
19,534
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Re: Corporatism = Fascism
Aug 11, 2004 8:39 AM
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Wallace was a supporter of the Soviet Union, as were you.
Take care.
"After months of questioning my motives and even my credibility, Senator Kerry now agrees with me...(to)remove Saddam Hussein from power...(but)there are still 84 days left in the campaign."--President George W. Bush in Pensacola, Florida--8/10
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Posts:
15
Registered:
8/6/04
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(3 of 12)
Re: Corporatism = Fascism
Aug 11, 2004 8:40 AM
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Execellent piece dealing with the reality of our 1933- like situation
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Posts:
19,822
From:
Middle Earth
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(4 of 12)
Aug 11, 2004 8:55 AM
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And if you can't make an intelligent post why bother? I know you don't think you are a fascist, but , well, the evidence is agin ya.
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Posts:
19,534
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Washington DC
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(5 of 12)
Aug 11, 2004 8:59 AM
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Sweetheart, it is an immutable truism that Henry Wallace was a supporter of the Soviet Union. Did you not know that? Look it up, dear, for you might learn something for once in your sad life.
Take care, my friend.
"After months of questioning my motives and even my credibility, Senator Kerry now agrees with me...(to) remove Saddam Hussein from power...(but) there are still 84 days left in the campaign."--President George W. Bush in Pensacola, Florida--8/10
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Posts:
2,343
From:
Through the Looking Glass
Registered:
8/30/02
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Please Read a bit of History
Aug 11, 2004 9:35 AM
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Mr. Wallace was a bigger communist dupe than FDR himself.
Wallace proved to be a large funnel of Information to the Russians. His brother-in-law was a communist spy. Old Mr. Wallace had very loose lips. Although he was never accused of actually being a Spy, Wallace proved to be as effective as a bug in the White House.
(this can be found quite easily reading any Number of books concerning the FDR whitehouse Years)
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Posts:
2,523
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7/18/04
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Re: Corporatism = Fascism
Aug 11, 2004 1:25 PM
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Good article. Thanks for the informative post.
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936 speech
"You and I, we can do better." - John Edwards
"I will not mislead this nation into war." - John Kerry
"President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies." - Dr. Justin Frank, George Washington University psychiatrist
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." -- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
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Posts:
2,523
Registered:
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(8 of 12)
Aug 11, 2004 1:35 PM
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Read some history yourself, and please do try to refrain from your childish personal attacks in lieu of any intelligent discussion (ie, "your sad life").
Now, in 1944, the US government officially supported the Soviet Union. They were our allies against a common enemy in time of war. Without the Soviet Union opposing Hitler, it is quite likely that England would have been overrun and America put under increasing economic and military pressure until it too succombed to the forces of fascism.
So that Wallace supported the Soviet Union is of little import. You prefer to dwell on that unimportant point and ignore the truth of what he and others at the time warned of the creeping fascism within our borders.
The US saw its greatest period of economic health, growth, and the US middle class enjoyed its greatest period of peace and security in the 1950's. Why is that? Because of the worldwide defeat of fascist powers, and the resultant move to a more equitable social an economic environment here at home. But American fascists, slowly but surely, reclaimed their power and resumed their subversion of the constitution. Eisenhower, bless his militarily liberal soul, saw this happening and tried to warn us of it as well.
Once a British Jew remarked to me, "Wouldn't it have been awful if the Nazis had won?". I agreed, but it seems to me that fascism is still very much with us today.
A by-note: Wallace was a bit too left-wing for even FDR. I imagine that articles such as Wallace wrote about American Fascism didn't help him retain his place. Under pressure from his own party, and somewhat reluctantly, FDR dropped Wallace from the ticket for the '44 election, choosing instead the former war hero (WWI) and stolid if unremarkable Harry Truman.
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936 speech
"You and I, we can do better." - John Edwards
"I will not mislead this nation into war." - John Kerry
"President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies." - Dr. Justin Frank, George Washington University psychiatrist
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." -- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
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Posts:
19,534
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Washington DC
Registered:
7/21/04
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(9 of 12)
Aug 11, 2004 1:50 PM
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Grumbli, you need not lecture me on American History.
I wouldn't exactly call Eisenhower "militarily liberal." To be sure, he was no Patton or MacArthur, but he was not a pacifist either.
FDR was an ignorant man in many respects. His economic policies perpetuated the depression. FDR had a staff replete with Commie sympathizers. Wallace was a huge fan of Communism. I thank God every day that Wallace was dropped from the 44' ticket! But Truman is incredibly overrated in my opinion. Though I'm a big fan of his decision to use the atom bombs on Japan, he erred on other things. The Soviets perceived Harry "I like Stalin" Truman as weak. Remember why the Berlin Airlift was necessary? Winston Churchill was rebuffed by Harry Truman for his 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech. Not only did Harry apologize to Stalin, he offered to send the USS Missouri to bring the Stalin to the United States and deliver a speech countering Churchill's claims. And Harry's handling of the Communist infiltration problem was no better than FDR's. Not to mention harry's weak war strategy in Korea.
Take care.
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Posts:
2,523
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Aug 11, 2004 5:31 PM
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Eisenhower knew the horror of war and that informed his foreign policy. Notice that no disastrous foreign military adventures were attempted during his terms in office.
Truman's main problem was being kept in the dark by FDR. I think his biggest error was not demonstrating the power of the atomic bomb to the Japanese as a final warning. Even if it had failed to impress them, as was feared, it would have given the US a higher moral plane from which to drop the "gadget".
My jewish English friend, describing Churchill, in reference to the bombing of Coventry, said, "He was a bahstard, but we needed one on our side at that time.". As soon as the war was over, the British public rewarded Churchill by booting him out of office.
Truman's plan for Korea was as sound as Bush1's plan was for Iraq. MacArthur blew a great military victory by insisting on going all the way. Truman's mistake was letting MacArthur have his way - up to a point.
Don't you think it's interesting that the world's western democracies are more or less continually opposed by nations taken over by groups who hate what they think we've done to their lands and peoples? In the 20th century, it was fascism. Then it was communism. And now, radical islamism. It's easy enough to say, all these groups were evil, but that facile conclusion only hurts our own ability to learn and grow.
If we had learned our lesson from WWII, we sure didn't show it in how we handled the Soviets. And we sure are not showing in in how we are handling countries like Iraq.
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936 speech
"You and I, we can do better." - John Edwards
"I will not mislead this nation into war." - John Kerry
"President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies." - Dr. Justin Frank, George Washington University psychiatrist
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." -- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
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Posts:
1
Registered:
9/10/04
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(11 of 12)
Sep 10, 2004 11:08 PM
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It seems as though it is assumed as a given that communism was inherently evil. Without getting into the ways the USSR failed to really implement their ideal, it should probably be mentioned that communism was literally the diametric opposite of fascism.
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Posts:
1,345
From:
Geographic Agnostic
Registered:
2/19/03
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(12 of 12)
Corporatism Empowers and Enriches The Riff-Raff
Sep 15, 2004 5:11 AM
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From top to bottom, a powerful and wealthy corporation can be controlled by uneducated and uncultured ruffians who lack the sensitivity needed by a society. Thousands of corporations are controlled by people who lack the Doctor's and Master's degrees that are basic requirements for European corporate directors. All an American corporation needs to succeed is the money, talent and time of totally undisciplined people with no sense of noblesse oblige. That is why it so important for all college Freshpersons to see the play: "Death Of A Salesman" depicting the horror of the American corporation.
"Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs". Josef Stalin (1879-1953)
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