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Banned
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Originally Posted by loquitur
Host, read the flippin' post. It says Mussolini moved from socialism and developed fascism. I didn't think that was a particularly controversial historical point. The controversial point these days is how much socialism was imported into Fascist thought, and how significant the imported elements were.
But please, deal with my post instead of latching onto a peripheral point.
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The first sentence is not a "peripheral point"....it twists a commonplace, at the time, 1914 and earlier socialist party membership and employment as a jounralist at a socialist publication, into:
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Mussolini grew up from birth a devoted Marxist steeped in the ideology of class identity and conflict.
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...and, as I have hinted at, it is another "right centric" attempt to rewrite the actual history:
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http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...2C&btnG=Search
Chief US prosecutor, Robert Jackson, at the Nuremberg trials:
"It has always been the position of the United States that the great industrialists of Germany were guilty of crimes charged in the indictment quite as much as the politicians, diplomats, and soldiers,"
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...i_6323522/pg_1
No more Munichs! What the media won't tell - German industry and the Munich Pact
Monthly Review, April, 1988 by Gene H. Ben-Villada
.....Munich had all the politics of war without a shooting war, and hence its appeal to narrative and diplomatic historians. What will concern us here, however, is the larger and long-ignored ideological setting of the Munich Pact. And in order to deal with that setting, two fundamental and interrelated facts must be plainly stated at the outset: (1) Nazi Germany was a capitalist state, and (2) European fascism was stridently and violently anticommunist, anti-Marxist, and anti-Soviet.
These truths should be self-evident, though in official American discourse they are not. On the contrary, in the established U.S. media, education, and oratory every effort is made to blur, confuse, or conceal those facts. The underlying objective is rather to exclude Nazi Germany from the history of Western capitalism and anticommunism, and displace the regime elsewhere. The interpretive scheme utilized to that ideological end is the now-tired theory of "totalitarianism," according to which fascism and communism are the same system. That German industry remained privately owned and even prospered under Nazism, and that communists and fascists clashed in bloody battles from 1930 to 1945, are blocks of knowledge conveniently ignored under so neatly symmetrical a formula. In most U.S. textbooks and newspapers, Nazi anticommunism is conspicuous by its absence. The result is widespread political confusion. Many a professor on U.S. campuses knows the experience of talking to bright 18-yearolds who ask whether General Franco was a communist and who are unable to distinguish between French Resistance and collaborators, or who really do believe that Nazism was "socialist" and that the Axis consisted of the Reich in collusion with Russia. In the official U.S. version that has become common currency, fascists were communists rather than their brutal antagonists, and the Eastern Front scarcely took place.
The issue of complicity between German capitalists and the rising Nazi politicians is a touchy one, and to bring it out into the open can damage an historian's career, as the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0691101183/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1">recent case of David Abraham</a> demonstrates....
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...i_6323522/pg_3
....Time-Life President Henry Luce himself was enthusiastic about European fascism until as late as 1938. In a 1934 address to the Chamber of Commerce of Scranton, Pennsylvania, he proclaimed that "the moral force of fascism, appearing in totally different forms in different nations, may be the inspiration for the next general march of mankind." Early in 1938 he visited the Reich, and, in an unpublished report on his travels, glowed with pleasure at the Nazi regime. He was enraptured that "in Germany there is no 'soak the rich' ideology," for indeed, "the extraordinary thing about Hitler . . . is that he has suspended the class war." Having seen the many busy theaters and the motorbikes in the streets, Luce would conclude that the German peopl"did not seem to be slaves. Their chains are not visible." Nazi Germany, Luce believed, was much ("misunderstood." 12
Luce was not the only one with such beliefs. At the time, many American businessmen were praising the Hitler regime and finding it most advantageous to their interests. In October 1933, General Motors President William S. Knudsen returned to New York from Germany and informed reporters that the Nazi regime was "the miracle of the twentieth century." In December 1936, James D. Mooney, head of General Motors in Europe and in charge of the Opel works, told an American diplomat that "we ought to make some arrangements with Germany for the future," and later met with Nazi Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht to discuss prospects for joint commerce between the two countries. Walter Teagle, President of Standard Oil of New Jersey, became a director of the American branch of I. G. Farben, and throughout the Second World War there was to persist between the two firms a Byzantine relationship involving patents and export licenses. 13 Sosthenes Behn, the colorfully sinister founder and president of International Telephone and Telegraph, enjoyed good relations with top Nazis. One ITT subsidiary was headed by a man who would later become an SS general. Another ITT firm bought a 28 percent share of the Focke-Wulf aircraft company in 1938.14 The value of U.S. business interests in Nazi Germany has been estimated at $475 million in 1941.15
11. W.A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribner's, 1972), pp. 128-30.
12. Ibid., pp. 109 and 154-56.
13. Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 (New York: Delacorte, 1983), pp. 32, 163, and 166.
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loquitur, when I heard Jonah Goldberg being interviewed about his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0385511841/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1">new book</a> on Salem Comm. radio recently, I chuckled to myself as I drove along, listening to Goldberg's points, wondering if anyone really subscribed to his upside down take of where fascism resides on the political spectrum.
I am not laughing now, because, if you believe there is some merit to Goldberg's pov, I have to accept that the REAL RIGHT, buys his lines in the latest "Mighty Wurlitzer" rendition..."fascism comes from the left", hook, line, and sinker. That is sobering, because the idea that we have any common ground becomes shakier with each new discovery of how divided our perceptions are. |