I understand that you can be a Conservative and you can also be a decent, honest, good person who knows what he/she's talking about. Obviously...
But at the same time - I question whether you can be a loyal Republican and be all that, too. Not with the clay-brained dinosaurs who're running the party at the moment.
Say what you want about the Democrats - the Republicans have become a party of idiots. McCain should have stuck to his year 2000, "Straight Talk" ways. What he's doing now is leading a convention that puts all of Bush's failures on a pedestal; everything from the arrogance of Bush's foreign policy, insisting he's right on Iraq, continuing the War on Terror as it is, mixing this emotive religion with politics, to just plain being dirty and ridiculing the other side without any real thought... I don't know how an out-of-the-box thinker can't be sickened!
Let me take a guess as to your response... "and I suppose you think the Democrats are perfect?"
Not to put words in your mouth - but I just want to preempt that kind of response and encourage Republicans to see this charade for what it is. They're dressing up a nasty old pig all nice and putting it in a wedding dress and expecting you to say "I do" without a second thought... Not only that - they're doing it to you for the third time in 12 years, and expecting you to see something different and fresh in the same old tricks. What is it that they say? - the definition of insanity is making the same choice over and over and expecting a different result?
"Fascism" is a term that was originally coined by the Italian dictator Mussolini to describe his adaptation of Marxism to the conditions of Italy after World War I. Lenin in Russia made somewhat different adaptations of Marxism to the conditions in Russia during the same period and his adaptations came to be called Marxism/Leninism. Mussolini stayed closer to Marx in that he felt that Italy had to go through a capitalist stage before it could reach socialism whereas Lenin attempted to push Russia straight from semi-feudalism into socialism. Mussolini's principal modification of Marxism was his rejection of the notion of class war, something that put him decisively at odds with Lenin's "Reds".
If the term "Fascism" means anything of itself it means "Groupism" -- as the fasci of Italy at the time were simply groups of political activists. The fasces of ancient Roman times were of course the bundles of rods carried by the lictors to symbolize the great strength of the organized Roman people. The idea again was that people were stronger in groups than as individuals.
Mussolini's ideas and system were very influential and he had many imitators -- not the least of which was Adolf Hitler -- and some even survived World War II -- such as Peron and Chiang Kai Shek. I have set out at length elsewhere what Mussolini's Italian Fascism was all about so I will simply summarize here by saying that Fascism was a nationalist form of extreme socialism whereas Trotskyism was/is a internationalist form of extreme socialism -- with Leninism being somewhere in between.
So was Mussolini a totally original thinker? Not at all. Students of ancient history see Sparta as the first Fascist State and students of Marx identify Fascism with "Bonapartism" (See Appendix 3 below) -- the type of regime devised by Napoleon Bonaparte and revived by his nephew Napoleon III. But Mussolini was quite intellectual and his thinking was in fact much more up-to-date than that would suggest. He was certainly influenced by Marx and the ancient world but he had a whole range of ideas that extended beyond that. And where did he turn for up-to-date ideas? To America, of course! And the American ideas that influenced him were in fact hard to miss. They were the ideas of the American "Progressives". And who was the best known Progressive in the world at that time? None other than the President of the United States -- Woodrow Wilson -- the man who was most responsible for the postwar order in Europe. So Mussolini had to do little more than read his newspapers to hear at least some things about the ideas of the very influential American Progressives. And who were the Progressives? Here is one summary of them:QUOTE
"Originally, progressive reformers sought to regulate irresponsible corporate monopoly, safeguarding consumers and labor from the excesses of the profit motive. Furthermore, they desired to correct the evils and inequities created by rapid and uncontrolled urbanization. Progressivism ..... asserted that the social order could and must be improved..... Some historians, like Richard Hofstadter and George Mowry, have argued that the progressive movement attempted to return America to an older, more simple, agrarian lifestyle. For a few progressives, this certainly was true. But for most, a humanitarian doctrine of social progress motivated the reforming spirit"
The summary of Progressivism above is from De Corte (1978). Against all his own evidence, De Corte also claims that the Progressives were "conservative". Why? Because there was something else about the Progressives that profoundly embarrasses both De Corte and all modern Leftists: The Progressives were keen eugenicists. So DeCorte tries to evade that. See here and here and also Pickens (1968) for the Leftist committment to eugenics prior to World War II.
Here is a brief summary of the "Progressive" era from a non-Leftist perspective:QUOTE
"The Progressive Era is a period of one big lie after another, crafted upon the false belief that modern government somehow could replace a free market, private property order and create an economy marked both by prosperity and "fairness." From "scientific" management to "enlightened" religion (called theological liberalism and, later, secularism) to Prohibition to "objective" journalism, the belief was that modern society had found the key to "onward and upward" progress."
And a scholarly summary can be found here in a book review of David W. Southern's book on the Progressive era. The following may be a useful excerpt:QUOTE
The Progressive movement swept America from roughly the early 1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broad popular consensus that government should be the primary agent of social change. To that end, legions of idealistic young crusaders, operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a mountain of new legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws, antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, women's suffrage, and electoral reform, among much else....
Yet the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900-1917, the very worst of it-disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, lynching-"went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism." Racism was the norm, not the exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by today's activist left.
At the heart of Southern's flawed but useful study is a deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. "At college," Southern notes, "budding progressives not only read exposes of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science."
the American "Progressives" of the late 19th and early 20th century were not only Leftists but they were also war-glorifying militarists. Hitler got not only his eugenic ideas from American Leftists but even his ideas about war being a purification of the national spirit etc. And who was it who said this? QUOTE
"Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty."
Was it Adolf? It sounds very much like either Adolf or Mussolini at the height of their powers but it was in fact said while both Hitler and Mussolini were still in the trenches of World War I and it was said by the President of the United States, the arch-Progressive Woodrow Wilson. See here for that and many other ways (including book-burning) in which Adolf learnt from American leftists. History can be very surprising. Loberfeld's short history of progressivism has more on its militaristic aspects.
Wilson even foreshadowed Hitler's racism. Note this quote about his actions in 1912:QUOTE
"Upon taking power in Washington, Wilson and the many other Southerners he brought into his cabinet were disturbed at the way the federal government went about its own business. One legacy of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy was that Washington's large black populace had access to federal jobs, and worked with whites in largely integrated circumstances. Wilson's cabinet put an end to that, bringing Jim Crow to Washington. Wilson allowed various officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments".
So Wilson actually reversed more tolerant policies put in place by Republicans. Racism was very LEFTIST in Hitler's day. Leftists like to portray Wilson as a visionary. They neglect to mention that the future he envisioned was a racially segregated one.
Jonah Goldberg has a good summary of the Wilson administration too:QUOTE
Under Woodrow Wilson, the first American president to embrace the new cult of pragmatism and power that had overtaken “enlightened” thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic (and the first American president to openly disdain the U.S. Constitution), the progressives unleashed a crackdown on freedom that makes the supposed fascism of the McCarthy era and the Bush years seem like a teach-in at Smith College. Wilson established the American Protective League, a group of domestic fascisti charged with crushing dissent, beating “slackers,” and intimidating average Americans. Wilson’s Committee for Public Information was the first modern propaganda ministry. Indeed, according to the late sociologist and intellectual historian Robert Nisbet, the “West’s first real experience with totalitarianism — political absolutism extended into every possible area of culture and society, education, religion, industry, the arts, local community and family included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings — came with the American war state under Wilson.”[size]
Double standard, or just incredibly ignorant (dare I say "stupid idiot")?
