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Originally Posted by EinsteinsGhost
I don't know about that, perhaps you could provide a credible source for me to look at? But does that change the fact that Henry Ford was a highly respected figure in Nazi Germany, the first foreign recipient of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, and an inspiration to Hitler?
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actually the nazi's were highly respected in the usa in the 30's
as hitler was the candidate of 'hope and change' taking war torn depression germany up to a top country in very few years
On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan
The dream of a planned society infected both right and left. Ernst Jünger, an influential right-wing militarist in Germany, reported his reaction to the Soviet Union: “I told myself: granted, they have no constitution, but they do have a plan. This may be an excellent thing.” As early as 1912, FDR himself praised the Prussian-German model: “They passed beyond the liberty of the individual to do as he pleased with his own property and found it necessary to check this liberty for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people,” he said in an address to the People’s Forum of Troy, New York.
American Progressives studied at German universities, Schivelbusch writes, and “came to appreciate the Hegelian theory of a strong state and Prussian militarism as the most efficient way of organizing modern societies that could no longer be ruled by anarchic liberal principles.” The pragmatist philosopher William James’ influential 1910 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” stressed the importance of order, discipline, and planning.
In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” He wasn’t hallucinating. FDR’s adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done “many of the things which seem to me necessary.” Lorena Hickok, a close confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt who lived in the White House for a spell, wrote approvingly of a local official who had said, “If [President] Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere.” She added that if she were younger, she’d like to lead “the Fascist Movement in the United States.” At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel-creating agency at the heart of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”
Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual.
In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.…Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”
The NRA’s Blue Eagle campaign, in which businesses that complied with the agency’s code were allowed to display a “Blue Eagle” symbol, was a way to rally the masses and call on everyone to display a visible symbol of support. NRA head Hugh Johnson made its purpose clear: “Those who are not with us are against us.”
One American poster of a sledgehammer bore the slogan “Work to Keep Free,” which D’Arcy found “chillingly close to ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ the sign that greeted prisoners at Auschwitz.” Similarly, a reissue of a classic New Deal documentary, The River (1938), prompted Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott to write that “watching it 70 years later on a new Naxos DVD feels a little creepy.…There are moments, especially involving tractors (the great fetish object of 20th-century propagandists), when you are certain that this film could have been produced in one of the political film mills of the totalitarian states of Europe.”
In 1944, in The Road to Serfdom, the economist F.A. Hayek warned that economic planning could lead to totalitarianism. He cautioned Americans and Britons not to think that there was something uniquely evil about the German soul. National Socialism, he said, drew on collectivist ideas that had permeated the Western world for a generation or more.
In 1973 one of the most distinguished American historians, John A. Garraty of Columbia University, created a stir with his article “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression.” Garraty was an admirer of Roosevelt but couldn’t help noticing, for instance, the parallels between the Civilian Conservation Corps and similar programs in Germany. Both, he wrote, “were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth ‘off the city street corners,’ Hitler as a way of keeping them from ‘rotting helplessly in the streets.’ In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. Furthermore, both were organized on semimilitary lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.”
Up until ww2, fascist and progressives were the same thing....But they dropped the term fascist due to public outcry and stuck with the term progressive ever since. Aside from being a complete nut of a dictator, Hitler had extremely liberal political policies and highly regulatory government agencies. He even had unviersal health care.
H.G. Wells was of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the twentieth century (and, it turns out, the inspiration for Huxley's Brave New World). Wells didn't coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become "liberal fascists" and "enlightened Nazis," he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July 1932.
This is why the fake liberals of today call themselves "liberal". They hijacked the word after progressive was tainted with Hitler, Eugenics, population control, economic fascism, etc.
F.D. Roosevelt, found in Mussolini's policies part of his inspiration for the semi-socialist "New Deal" and referred to Mussolini in 1933 as "that admirable Italian gentleman". Mussolini was plausible to an amazingly wide range of people -- not the least to the people of Italy.
And Roosevelt and his political allies practiced what they preached. As UPI financial journalist Martin Hutchinson has pointed out, the USA in the 1940s was a place "with price controls, government licensing of transportation, state intervention in the steel and auto industries, interest rates that were set by Treasury fiat and a capital market in which banks were not allowed to operate. Also a "democracy" in which electoral districts were wildly unequal and 15 percent of the population was denied the vote." By modern-day standards the USA of that time had considerable Fascist elements too. American Leftism was Fascist even then.
In 1954, Hofstadter chided those who had worried about "several close parallels" between FDR's N.R.A. and fascist corporatism. There are more than "several" parallels. In 1944, John T. Flynn made the case in As We Go Marching, where he enumerated the stigmata of generic fascism, surveyed the interwar policies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and pointed to uncomfortably similar American policies. For Flynn, the hallmarks of fascism were: 1) unrestrained government; 2) an absolute leader responsible to a single party; 3) a planned economy with nominal private ownership of the means of production; 4) bureaucracy and administrative "law"; 5) state control of the financial sector; 6) permanent economic manipulation via deficit spending; 7) militarism, and 8) imperialism (pp. 161-62). He proceeded to show that all these were alive and well under the wartime New Deal administration (pp. 166-258). Pragmatic American liberalism had produced "a genteel fascism" without the ethnic persecutions and full-scale executive dictatorship seen overseas.
There is practically no feature of modern-day Leftism that was not prefigured by Mussolini. It is clear from the many quotations and reports that are available (only a fraction of which are reproduced here) that Mussolini was very much a kindred spirit of modern-day Leftists. It is therefore hilarious that Leftists now use the name of his movement as their routine term of abuse! Ignorance of history does indeed lead to some strange follies.
He started out as such a radical unionist firebrand and Marxist agitator that he was often jailed for his pains. But as he matured he moved towards somewhat more moderate politics which saw him win power by political rather than by revolutionary means. Modern day Leftists seem to be the same. The young go out demonstrating against globalization and the like while older Leftists exert their efforts within the framework of conventional democratic politics -- via the major Leftist political parties.
And no-one was a more ardent advocate of government provision of basic services than Mussolini was -- and he actually put those ideas into practice on a large scale as well. And he also instituted a "welfare state" that was very advanced for the times.
In his "corporate state", Mussolini was the first to create that very modern phenomenon constantly now being advocated by Leftists everywhere -- 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. He actually put into full-blown practice what is still a great but rather misty ideal for most Leftists.
"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees." bill clinton
the facts are there...the history is there
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