Let's revisit this one~!
....
hahahahahahahahahahahaha : ) Lala
I don't expect a man who lives in a world of theory to grasp reality, but I
will try once more! History, my wayward Economist, is your greatest teacher
and witness! Like I said, all you need to do is read about it, and listen
to Liberals in their own words, and judge them by their own actions!
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Wells was not unique in offering this call to liberals. In giving us a true
alternative history of modern liberalism, Mr. Goldberg shows how the
ideological roots of fascism were liberal and left-wing, as were some of
fascism's early proponents, especially in the Italy of Benito Mussolini.
Most of us today forget that Mussolini, to his dying day, considered himself
a man of the left and a socialist, who through nationalism and the
corporatist reorganization of the polity sought to modernize a dying,
19th-century liberalism. Many will nevertheless be surprised to find that
Mussolini's large band of admirers included the journalist Herbert Matthews,
the comic Will Rogers, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the historian
Charles Beard, and the muckraker Lincoln Steffens. It only strengthens his
case to find that one person Mr. Goldberg leaves out, the founding father of
American trade unionism, Samuel Gompers, praised Mussolini's creation of a
new corporate state as a guide for American labor, and as a model for
American society as a whole.
Indeed, America, as Mr. Goldberg writes, certainly had a "Fascist moment."
It was not, however, during the current presidency, but one that extended
from progressivism through the New Deal. Mr. Goldberg traces the American
roots of liberal fascism to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who saw
increased state power as an organic and natural development. His
administration's War Industries Board laid the basis for future
government-industry regulatory agencies that tied business to the new
corporate state. Later on Mr. Goldberg reveals how Herbert Croly, who
founded the New Republic as the preeminent journal of the new liberalism,
presented classic fascist themes as the prescription for saving the country
in his influential book, "The Promise of American Life."
A major New Deal program, General Hugh Johnson's National Recovery
Administration, was an American version of Mussolini's corporate state.
Entering Johnson's office, visitors found a portrait of Mussolini on the
wall behind his desk. Industrial codes were to be enforced by the state and
to be made popular by Nuremberg-type rallies and giant parades, as thousands
marched under the symbol of the blue eagle. This marked the actual birth of
liberal fascism, as President Roosevelt built upon the statist and
collectivist roots of agencies created during World War I. As the vice
president of the American Federation of Labor, Matthew Woll, put it at the
time, "Labor might well assert that the seed of Fascism had been
transplanted" to America. The cartelization of industry, he noted, was "a
familiar story in the early history of Fascist Italy."
Turning to what he calls liberal racism, Mr. Goldberg offers readers his
finest chapter. It is a devastating picture of how liberals adopted
eugenics - a basic part of Nazi doctrine - which was not, as some liberal
intellectuals have argued, an outgrowth of conservative thought. Fans of
Margaret Sanger, perhaps the single most important feminist hero of the 20th
century, will never be able to think of her in the same way. Mr. Goldberg
dissects her hidden views of eugenics. A socialist and birth-control martyr,
she favored banning reproduction of the "unfit" and regulation of everyone
else's reproduction. She wrote, "More children from the fit, less from the
unfit - that is the chief issue of birth control." She opposed the birth of
"ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens." Her words reveal her
motive in advocacy of birth control. She sought to remove "inferior" people
from being born to poor people, whose mothers by definition were "unfit."
Sanger's partisans in Planned Parenthood, the group that stemmed from her
work, will be shocked to learn that her publication endorsed the Nazi
eugenics program, and that Sanger herself "proudly gave a speech to a KKK
rally." That was not surprising, since she clearly viewed blacks as
inferior. Hence her "Negro Project," in which she sought to urge blacks to
adopt birth control.
Some will rightfully take issue with Mr. Goldberg when he describes the
administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton as fascist. On
this, he strains and pushes his evidence too far to convince the reader that
these paragons of liberalism can be called fascist in any sense of the term.
Mr. Goldberg makes a stronger case when he accuses the New Left of classic
fascist behavior, when its cadre took to the streets and through action
discarded its early idealism for what Mr. Goldberg correctly calls "fascist
thuggery." Even if one does not consider the liberal administrations of the
recent past fascist, Mr. Goldberg is correct to see the liberalism of today
to be state worship, which built upon the original statist liberalism of the
Wilson administration.
Mr. Goldberg has, unlike the leftists who yell the term, made the strongest
possible case that Americans today live in a soft form of fascism, a statist
liberal society whose citizens are unaware of the roots of ideas they hold.
Echoing Susan Sontag, who pointed out that fascist ideas "are vivid and
moving to many people," Mr. Goldberg ends with a humorous look at the cult
of organic foods, vegetarianism, and animal rights, all programs and
policies first instituted in Nazi Germany. "We are all fascists now," he
concludes. Disagree if you must, but go out and read this brilliant,
insightful, and important book.
http://www.nysun.com/article/68954?page_no=2
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"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government
from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of
them." - Thomas Jefferson
Stupendous Man
http://www.myspace.com/stupendousfriends
