| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Black Elk" |
| Date: |
27 Feb 2005 04:32:12 PM |
| Object: |
The Big Money and Big Profits in Fascism |
Chapters 1 & 2 of the book Facts and Fascism by George Seldes
In Fact, Inc., 1943 - 7th edition, hard cover
Part 1
The Big Money and Big Profits in Fascism
CHAPTER I
FASCISM ON THE HOME FRONT
THE TIME will come when people will not believe it was possible to mobilize
10,800,000 Americans to fight Fascism and not tell them the truth about the
enemy. And yet, this is exactly what happened in our country in the Global
War.
The Office of War Information published millions of words, thousands of
pamphlets, posters and other material, most of it very valuable and all of
it intended to inspire the people and raise the morale of the soldiers of
production and the soldiers of the field; but it is also a fact that to the
date of this writing the OWI did not publish a single pamphlet, poster,
broadside or paper telling either the civilian population or the men and
women in uniform what Fascism really is, what the forces are behind the
political and military movements generally known as Fascism, who puts up the
money, who make the tremendous profits which Fascism has paid its backers in
Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and other nations.
Certainly when it comes to relating foreign Fascism with native American
Fascism there is a conspiracy of silence in which the OWI, the American
press, and all the forces of reaction in America are united. Outside of a
few books, a few pamphlets, and a few articles in the very small independent
weekly press which reaches only a few thousand readers, not one word on this
subject has been printed, and not one word has been heard over any of the
big commercial radio stations.
-cont.-
http://www.maebrussell.com/Articles%20and%20Notes/Facts%20and%20Fascism.html
--
Up until the German defeat at Stalingrad in late 1942, Adolf Hitler remained
the best thing that had ever happened to the German financial elite from a
strictly business point of view.
"The Splendid Blond Beast", Christopher Simpson
.
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| User: "Topaz" |
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| Title: Re: The Big Money and Big Profits in Fascism |
27 Feb 2005 06:01:27 PM |
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Here are parts of a post about Mussolini written by a very
anti-Mussolini person. He has done his homework though and cites many
books which are also anti-Mussolini and anti-Fascist. These are some
things they admit:
"He had a profound contempt for those whose overriding ambition was to
be
rich. It was a mania, he thought, a kind of disease, and he comforted
himself with the reflection that the rich were rarely happy"
Here Hibbert (1962, p. 47) is describing a lifelong attitude of
Mussolini
that continued right into his time as Italy's Prime Minister - when he
refused to take his official salary.
"There was much truth in the comment of a Rome newspaper that the new
fasci
did not aim at the defence of the ruling class or the existing State
but
wanted to lead the revolutionary forces into the Nationalist camp so
as to
prevent a victory of Bolshevism.
even after coming
to power, to take drives in the country with his wife and stop at
various
farmhouses on the way for a chat with the family there. He would enjoy
discussing the crops, the weather and all the usual rural topics and
obviously just liked the feeling of being one of the people. His claim
to
represent the people was not just theory but heartfelt. And he never
gave up
his "anti-bourgeois" rhetoric.
His policies were basically protectionist. He
controlled the exchange-rate of the Italian currency and promoted that
old
favourite of the economically illiterate - autarky - meaning that he
tried
to get Italy to become wholly self-sufficient rather than rely on
foreign
trade. He wanted to protect Italian products from competing foreign
products.
By 1939 he had doubled Italy's grain
production from its traditional level, enabling Italy to cut wheat
imports
by 75% (Smith, 1967, p. 92).
He made Capri a bird sanctuary (Smith, 1967, p. 84) and
in 1926 he issued a decree reducing the size of newspapers to save
wood
pulp. And, believe it or not, he even mandated gasohol - i.e. mixing
industrial alcohol with petroleum products to make fuel for cars
(Smith,
1967, p. 87). Mussolini also disliked the population drift from rural
areas
into the big cities and in 1930 passed a law to put a stop to it
unless
official permission was granted
he advocated private enterprise within
a strict set of State controls designed, among other things, to
prevent
abuse of monopoly power (Gregor, 1979, Ch. 5).
....a big
expansion of public works and a great improvement in social insurance
measures. He also set up the "Dopolavoro" (after work) organization to
give
workers cheap recreations of various kinds (cf. the Nazi Kraft durch
Freude
movement). His public health measures (such as the attack on
tuberculosis
and the setting up of a huge maternal and child welfare organization)
were
particularly notable for their rationality and efficiency and, as
such, were
rewarded with great success. For instance, the incidence of
tuberculosis
dropped dramatically and infant mortality declined by more than 20%
(Gregor,
p. 259).
"instituted a programme of public works hitherto unrivalled in modern
Europe. Bridges, canals and roads were built, hospitals and schools,
railway
stations and orphanages, swamps were drained and land reclaimed,
forest were
planted and universities were endowed."
In 1929 Mussolini and Pope Pius
12th signed the Lateran treaty - which is still the legal basis for
the
existence of the Vatican State to this day - and Pius in fact at one
stage
called Mussolini "the man sent by Providence". The treaty recognized
Roman
Catholicism as the Italian State religion as well as recognizing the
Vatican
as a sovereign state. What Mussolini got in exchange was acceptance by
the
church - something that was enormously important in the Italy of that
time.
the great hatred that existed in prewar
Germany between the Nazis and the "Reds". And the early Fascists
battled the
"Reds" too, of course.
The 1919 election
manifesto, for instance, contained policies of worker control of
industry,
confiscation of war profits, abolition of the Stock exchange, land for
the
peasants and abolition of the Monarchy and nobility. Further,
Mussolini
never ceased to inveigh against "plutocrats".
He wanted a harmonious and united
Italy for all Italians of all classes and was sure that achieving just
treatment for the workers needed neither revolution nor any kind of
artificially enforced equality.
This made Italian Fascism a much more popular creed than Stalin's
Communism. This
is perhaps most clearly seen by the always persuasive "voting with
your
feet" criterion. Mussolini made no effort to prevent Italians from
emigrating and although some anti-Fascists did, net emigration
actually FELL
under Mussolini. Compare this with Stalin and the Berlin wall.
Mussolini gained
power through political rather than revolutionary means. His famous
march on
Rome was only superficially revolutionary. The King of Italy and the
army
approved of him because of his pragmatic policies so did not oppose
the
march. So this collusion ensured that Mussolini's "revolution" was
essentially bloodless.
His considerable popularity for many years among a wide
range of Italians shows how effective his recipe for achieving that
was.
In his "corporate state", Mussolini was the first to create ...a
system
of capitalism under tight government control. And his corporate state
was
one where the workers had (at least in theory) equal rights with
management.
REFERENCES Amis, M. (2002) Koba the Dread : laughter and the twenty
million.
N.Y.: Talk Miramax
Carsten, F.L. (1967) The rise of Fascism. London: Methuen.
Funk & Wagnall's New Encyclopedia (1983) Funk & Wagnall's
Galbraith, J.K. (1969) The affluent society. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Gilmour, I.H.J.L. (1978) Inside right. London: Quartet.
Greene, N. (1968) Fascism: An anthology. N.Y.: Crowell.
Gregor, A.J. (1979) Italian Fascism and developmental dictatorship
Princeton, N.J.: Univ. Press.
Hagan, J. (1966) Modern History and its themes. Croydon, Victoria,
Australia: Longmans.
Hibbert, C. (1962) Benito Mussolini Geneva: Heron Books. Herzer, I.
(1989)
The Italian refuge: Rescue of Jews during the holocaust. Washington,
D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press
Horowitz, D. (1998) Up from multiculturalism. Heterodoxy, January.
See:
http://www.cspc.org/het/multicul.htm
Lenin, V.I. (1952) "Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder. In:
Selected Works, Vol. II, Part 2. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing
House.
Martino, A. (1998) The modern mask of socialism. 15th John Bonython
lecture,
Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney. See
http://www.cis.org.au/Events/JBL/JBL98.htm
Muravchik, J. (2002) Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
San
Francisco: Encounter Books.
Smith, D.M. (1967) The theory and practice of Fascism. In: Greene, N.
Fascism: An anthology N.Y.: Crowell.
Steinberg, J. (1990) All or nothing: The Axis and the holocaust
London:
Routledge.
www.spearhead-uk.com http://www.natvan.com
http://www.thebirdman.org http://www.RealNews247.com
.
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