[Dialogue] [Fwd: [IP] Lest we forget]

[Ed Reames]

Great article by Henry Wallace about fascism.

Ed Reames
La Rivera de Belén
Costa Rica

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[IP] Lest we forget
Date: 	Mon, 18 Apr 2005 10:44:30 -0400
From: 	David Farber <dave at farber.net>
Reply-To: 	dave at farber.net
To: 	Ip <ip at v2.listbox.com>




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*From: *Severo Ornstein <severo at poonhill.com>
*Date: *Sun, 17 Apr 2005 21:45:19 -0700
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*Subject: *Lest we forget

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm

The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
by Thom Hartmann
/
Published on Monday, July 19, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
 
/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.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored 
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated 
daily progressive talk radio show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent 
books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The 
Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," and "We The 
People: A Call To Take Back America." His new book, "What Would 
Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy," based on four years of research 
in Jefferson's personal letters, begins shipping this week from Random 
House/Harmony.
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